Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

In many respects Me and Earl and the Dying Girl resembles a typical US high school comedy. Thomas Mann plays Greg Gaines, an awkward, self-deprecating senior who is trying to make it through his final year while maintaining a healthy but distant dynamic with the various cliques and factions within his year group. Katherine C. Hughes plays Madison, the attractive, popular girl Greg is infatuated with and Ronald Cyler II plays his eponymous friend Earl with whom he makes comedy pastiches of iconic films.

It is here that the film diverts from an archetypal path, becoming more cineliterate and esoteric than might be expected, with the short films they make having parodic titles such as Death in Tennis and My Dinner with Andre the Giant. The other major diversion from a generic path is the central relationship between Greg and Rachel, played by Olivia Cooke, the dying girl referred to in the title. Rachel is a childhood friend of Greg’s, and now a very loose acquaintance, who is diagnosed with leukaemia. Although, naturally this being a Hollywood film, it doesn’t have the conviction to portray Rachel as she is in the script. The character Rachel refers to herself as ‘not pretty’ but this is blatantly not true of Cooke. The relationship between her and Greg is however very sweet and genuinely affecting. It may ultimately be a fairly sanitised portrayal of cancer, given that the film is a 12a and, at the end of the day, a high school comedy-drama, but again it is also presented by the filmmakers with real pathos, and without the cynicism that it could have succumbed to in trying to elicit an emotional response.

It is only the second feature film of director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who has worked largely in television, but he has clearly honed his skills to a high level in that medium. The film has an infectious energy, is consistently funny, and plaintive in the right moments. Definitely a success.