Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Every once in a great while, a true cinematic gem appears, seemingly out of the ether  In this case, the ether was the Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Prize for Drama and the Audience Award for U.S. Drama.

The film is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. 

It’s a coming-of-age dramedy about Greg (Thomas Mann), a creative high school senior with extremely low self-esteem, his street-wise buddy Earl (RJ Cyler) and Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a classmate, who is suffering from leukemia. 

The film falls into the same genre as last year’s The Fault in Our Stars, but, here, there’s no star power other than Connie Britton and Molly Shannon, who play Greg’s and Rachel’s mothers, respectively. 

                                                                   

Yet, it has more humor and is more delicately   directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon from an absolutely lovely script by Jesse Andrews, who, also, wrote the book from which it was derived.   With this magic collaboration, the movie outdoes the book with some animated visuals that only film can offer.

The young cast is superb and the Cinematography of Chung-hoon Chung is perfection.

In short, there is no fault in in this film.   I give Me and Earl and the Dying Girl a 4+ out of 5.