Me and Earl and The Dying Girl (12A, 105mins)
Starring: Thomas Mann, Olivia Cooke, Ronald Cyler II, Nick Offerman, Connie Britton
Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
RATING: TWO STARS
MY INTERNAL 'Schmindie Indie Cinema Klaxon' began to screech the moment the trailer for Me and Earl and The Dying Girl made its puzzlingly proud proclamation "from the studio that brought you 500 Days of Summer".
Actually, the SICK – which sounds exactly like every physical format of 500 Days being smashed to smithereens by thousands of stony faced, sledgehammer-wielding Jason Stathams – may have been activated by the film title itself.
However, as you may have guessed, the 2009 Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt starring indie rom com is an important dividing line in terms of gauging the tastes of the cinema-going population.
Either you despise its drippy, relentlessly name-dropping ("Do you like The Smiths?") cutesy quirkiness or you're, like, really into that sort of thing.
Choose and perish: those doomed to fester in the latter, hellishly twee camp of Deschanel-worshippers will most certainly get the most out of MAEATDG's similarly style-over-substance 'charms'.
Admittedly, MAEATDG is somehow not quite as risible as 500 Days. A lot of that is down to the obvious visual flair of director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, American Horror Story) and his cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung (Stoker, Old Boy).
They make ample use of the creative camera work license afforded to them by their lead characters' obsession with jokey no-budget re-makes of classic art house fare from various genres, throwing the lens around in an energetic, gleefully untethered manner.
Pittsburgh highschoolers Greg (Thomas Mann) and Earl (Ronald Cyler II) have spent most of their adolescence absorbing the often challenging output of Herzog, Truffaut, Fellini, Powell and Pressburger et al while shooting their own parodic shorts with pun-tastic titles like The Turd Man, A Sockwork Orange and Grumpy Cul-de-Sacs.
The film's narrative is what lets the side down – and, having adapted his own novel, screenwriter Jesse Andrews only has himself to blame.
By all accounts, his 2012 book is a good bit wittier, raunchier and raw than what's ended up on the big screen, which is basically a feast of irritatingly 'meta' posturing (Greg's voice-over offers a continuous 'director's commentary' of the "if this were a typical romantic story then x would happen – but it's not" variety) that plays like a too-cool-for-school version of the similarly themed The Fault In Our Stars.
However, MAEATDG doesn't even have the integrity to stick to its wilfully detached guns.
Hopefully, it won't be giving too much away to reveal that the story climaxes with a shamelessly tear-jerking sequence in which the titular terminal teen (the leukaemia-riddled Rachel, played by Olivia Cooke) expires as she watches Greg's Andy Warhol-referencing short.
It's at this pivotal soundtracked by a stirring Brian Eno number point in proceedings that the absurdity of MAEATDG's central premise really hits home: the apparently otherwise intelligent Rachel chooses to spend her final, pain and discomfort-filled six months alive by hanging out with emotionally stunted fun-vacuum Greg (who's literally forced into the arrangement by his mother because The Plot Demands It) while smiling encouragingly at the bad student films he's been too embarrassed to show anyone else.
By Greg's own admission, these are no-budget goofs with an entertainment factor that barely stretches beyond their tittersome titles.
Earl even tries to warn her: "We make films – they're terrible," he advises.
Their bizarre non-friendship friendship – Greg insists on referring to the long-suffering Earl as his "co-worker" – is also a major weak spot.
It would have been a really great reveal if Greg's folks (cliched, phoned-in performances from the usually reliable Nick Offerman and Connie Britton) had actually been paying Earl to endure their son's insufferable company.
Tellingly, the one serious physical altercation of the film involves Earl righteously laying out his 'colleague'. You may feel like cheering.
While MAEATDG serves as a strong visual calling card for director Gomez-Rejon, as entertainment it plays like a stylish yet soulless and irritatingly pretentious Wes Anderson rip-off.
Don't make Rachel's mistake – life is too short to waste it on bad movies.
