High-schooler Greg is ordered by his parents to befriend a fellow student, Rachel, whom he knew as a child, who is now dying of cancer. This outline might sound conventional, even saccharine, and you might even expect the dying girl to survive, but the film is really about grief and how art is both a comfort and a displacement activity.
For a film centred on death, Jesse Andrew’s screenplay, adapted from his own novel, is surpisingly funny, much of the humour arising from the film parodies that Greg makes with his friend Earl that he uses to entertain Rachel.
“as Greg’s deadpan voiceover keeps telling us, this is not a love story; rather, it is a tale of mismatched friendships of the kind that once fired John Hughes’s teen movies.” Mark Kermode – Observer
“Forget The Fault in Our Stars, somehow the director turns Me and Earl’s gloopy subject matter into a funny, highly original and very moving film.” Independent.