Despite Sundance’s vaulted reputation, there’s often a sense of condemnation in calling a movie a “Sundance film.” It conjures up overcooked indie-film tropes, all manner of things that might weigh down a movie, from toxic preciousness to manufactured waterworks. On paper, Me And Earl And The Dying Girl draws every one of these ready-made criticisms: It’s got self-conscious teens who fetishize classic film and music, a cancer-ridden love interest, and a protagonist who can’t engage with his feelings until they’re put to emotional gunpoint.
Earl was a resounding success at Sundance, with a record-breaking $12 million sale to Fox Searchlight. Now we have the first trailer, and while it runs down every single expected indie-film trailer beat—Street Hassle cover! Deadpan whimsy! Paralyzed creatives!—it also looks genuinely inspired, with its gallows hipster humor and a sentimental but grounded undercurrent. It also looks like you might want to keep a box of tissues at hand.
The movie, based on a well-received YA novel, follows cripplingly self-conscious high-schooler Greg Gaines, who reimagines classic movies with dumber names with his straight-shooter best friend, Earl. After his mother forces him to visit his cancer-stricken neighbor, Rachel, Greg finds himself changing, and Greg and Earl set out to make a film for Rachel.
Watch the trailer below and imagine your own potty-mouthed take on classic movies:
The trail of the tape
Title: Me And Earl And The Dying Girl
Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Screenwriter: Jesse Andrews
Cast: Olivia Cooke, Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Connie Britton, Nick Offerman, Molly Shannon
Release date: June 12, 2015
The entire trailer in one line of dialogue: “So if this was a touching, romantic story, our eyes would meet, and suddenly we would be making out with the fire of a thousand suns. But this isn’t a touching romantic story.”
The entire trailer in one screengrab:
Here at The Dissolve, we don’t like to be killjoys. But while there was near-rapturous, unanimous praise for Gomez-Rejon’s film, our own Mike D’Angelo and Noel Murray were less impressed. Mike walked out on the film after a half hour while Noel wrote a thoughtful examination of his own dislike of the film. “The overarching problem I have with Me & Earl is with Greg, who according to the film needs only to get over his lack of ambition and his self-deprecation, when really, he should stop being so self-centered,” wrote Noel. “Greg’s apparent lack of interest in Earl’s and Rachel’s lives is a character flaw I kept waiting to be exposed. Instead, this movie is obstinately self-congratulatory: a reassurance to all the high school kids that someday their secret genius will be recognized by their peers.”
Those caveats addressed, Noel did heap praise on both Gomez-Recon’s visual acumen (two of the most buzzed-about sequences from Sundance included a single take that travels around a house, and a time-lapse POV shot of Greg visiting an increasingly ill Rachel) and the film’s embrace of teenage fantasy. We can all weigh in for ourselves come June.