The worst part is that "Me and Earl" believes it is aware of all of this. Every cliché arrives with a wink of self-knowing commentary before it, to say, "Yes, we know this is a cliche, but we are making a comment about the cliché!" Saying it don't make it so. Besides, such commentary has been done before, and it's been done much better. There's a laziness at work in "Me and Earl," a reliance on well-trod ground and over-chewed cultural tropes, and perhaps it is supposed to be that way (these are kids who see everything through the lens of their movie-watching), but it still doesn't work. The winks about the clichés, including the one in the title, only serve to point up how tired those clichés are.
Greg (Thomas Mann) is a detached and depressive teenager, who resists emotional involvement to such a degree that he can't even admit that his best friend since childhood, Earl (RJ Cyler), is his best friend. He refers to Earl, instead, as a "co-worker." He and Earl grew up watching movies like Werner Herzog's "Aguirre The Wrath of God", Truffaut's "The 400 Blows," Powell and Pressberger's "Tales of Hoffmann," and spend their free time as teenagers making their own movies, spoofs of the greats with titles like "The 400 Bros," "The Sockwork Orange," and "2:48 p.m. Cowboy." One day Greg's mother (Connie Britton) orders him to go visit Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a classmate just diagnosed with cancer. Greg does not even know Rachel, but he shows up at her house, and is immediately lusted over by Rachel's boozy mother (Molly Shannon), who answers the door with a drink in her hand, cooing about who is this "delicious," "yummy" young man. Rachel is confused as to why Greg is there, annoyed even, and Greg begs to be allowed to hang out with her, just for one day, so he can report back to his mother.
Because of course, it is a dying girl's responsibility to make the world okay for everyone in her midst, to be inspirational, to teach people how to love, how to live—even strangers who show up at her door on a charity mission. At one point he says, "Please appreciate how honest I just was." A valid answer to that statement would be, "No. I'm dying. I don't know you. Go away."
The whole point of "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" is that through his relationship with Rachel, Greg starts to live for someone other than himself. He and Earl decide to make a movie for Rachel, a tribute, and they hurry to finish it before she dies. Teenagers are self-involved. Learning to live in the world, to recognize that others exist, that your actions have consequences, is a part of growing up. Authors like Paul Zindel, S.E. Hinton, and, more recently, John Green, all wrote books featuring teenagers who have to learn, sometimes painfully, that who they are has meaning, that they have to be responsible for themselves, and kind to others. "Me and Earl" wants to be a part of that genre without bothering to create characters that live.
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