Me and Earl shows the beauty and pain in growing up and finding your place in the world.
High school’s a pretty funny time in our lives because it’s relatively irrelevant. Even as a pretty laid-back kid, I remember feeling that my problems carried a weight that was all imaginary looking back down on them. And yet these instances shape us to be who we are so they’re immensely important at the same time. Human existence is weird.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is the embodiment of this self-bloated importance clashing with something jolting and heavy; something that forces narcissism out of its wake. “Me” is Greg, a gawky ironically self-loathing highschooler in the Pittsburgh suburbs played by Thomas Mann who seems to take pride in how much he can’t fit into a normal high school group, blaming poor social skills and lack of ability to stay in touch with anyone his age. When not waxing poetic on his inability to slip into society, Greg makes parodies of famous art-house cinema with his friend Earl, played by RJ Cyler, who is in most ways Greg’s opposite; cool, confident, and sure footed in his high school path. Then, as the title suggests, The Dying Girl steps in. Rachel, played by Olivia Cooke, exists on the curtains of Greg’s life as a member of “Boring Jewish Senior Girls, Subgroup 2A”; one of the many classifications in the taxonomy Greg categorizes high school with. After Rachel is diagnosed with leukemia, Greg’s mother encourage-forces him to spend time with this girl he barely knows; an awkward but relatable sensation of youth.
As it stands, the two do get along really well, but are both fairly preoccupied, Rachel by her completely understandable cancer treatment, and Greg by his self-inflation of importance. No matter how hard life tries to wrestle his ego out of the way, Greg is determined to make a lot of the situations in his life about him until this path starts to tear down all of the relationships he never realized his existence depended on, mostly thanks to some reality checks by his peers. Particularly Earl.
Me and Earl is about that crucial turn in life where you start to come into understanding about who you are and your role in this life; particularly about how it fits into a puzzle much greater than yourself. In Me and Earl, Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon tells the story in a way that makes the film organically adolescent to its benefit. Calling back to 2013’s The Spectacular Now, the film manages to feel like it isn’t some warning fable told from an adult’s voice, instead giving the microphone to the film’s teenagers and letting them find their own way. Greg encounters his faults on his own and works towards fixing them himself. Along with letting his actors take the wheel, Gomez-Rejon creates a refreshingly updated look at high school, filled with legitimately cool music, movies, and pop culture in general. Greg loves the Criterion Collection. Earl ironically recreates Midnight Cowboy. I could see Rachel reading Pitchfork.
Greg’s transformation out of his self-pitying ways through film, friendship, and a few punches to the face is a very intriguing notch in the young adult phenomena of the last few years, in one of the most charming styles high school narcissism can possibly take.
