Winner of the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, this indie coming-of-age dramedy is all about Greg (Mann), a teenage boy whose mother makes him spend time with cancer-stricken classmate Rachel (Cooke).
Unlike the recent The Fault In Our Stars, which featured a romantic relationship between two teenagers with cancer, and worked hard to make the audience sob, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl eschews romance for laughs.
Cynical narrator Greg is a gawky, ordinary teenager surviving high school by being invisible; getting on with all the cliques while belonging to none. He calls best mate Earl (Cyler) his "co-worker" and they spend their free time making intentionally bad parodies of classic movies such as "A Sockwork Orange" and "Senior Citizen Kane", which will keep film fans amused.
First-time feature director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon clearly doesn't want to debut with a conventional film. He uses stop-motion animation and illustration, and isn't afraid to play with frame size, occasionally tipping the camera on its side. Which gives Me and Earl an offbeat aesthetic, somewhere between a Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry film.
It suits a sharp and clever script by Jesse Andrews, who wrote the 2012 young adult book of the same name.
