ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL looks like it has been filmed on crumpled up brown paper instead of celluloid. Not just any crumpled up brown paper, in fact, but the sort that might once have lovingly housed your packed lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and a single banana, or the sort you would cut two holes in and use as a Halloween mask. The palette of browns and mustards is warm, crisp and homely, and evokes the smell of sweaty Skechers to a perfect degree. ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL is also, quite blatantly, a film about death and dying. Placing this blunt thud at the centre of the post-hipster awkward-ness, the film explores just how untimely, rude and alien death might be. It also explores how this same death might be troublingly and infuriatingly commonplace – even frivolous.

Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) is trying to get through his final year of high-school as invisibly as possible, avoiding the clichéd canteen-tribe scenario entirely by eating in a teacher’s office with his best friend Earl (Ronald Cyler II). The pair have been inseparable from an early age, reclusively producing “goofy” remakes of old films together with a home video-camera. Upon learning that Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a vague acquaintance in his year at school, has been diagnosed with leukaemia, Greg’s mother forces him to pay her visits by way of a good deed. What begins as stilted obligation inevitably evolves into an important friendship for them both. When Rachel learns she has even less time than she originally thought, Greg and Earl decide to make a film for her, yet fall upon an unexpected draught of inspiration.

Should a film about death be addressed to the living or the dying? Should we even make that division?

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL quite brilliantly plays around with the writer’s block affecting Greg and Earl’s own film, even if this doesn’t always seem intentional. The plot is constantly making stammering, ineloquent claims about what it is and isn’t about, with Greg at one point warning us in voiceover that this won’t be the kind of story in which he and Rachel passionately embrace and live happily ever after. Some narrative strands remain untied, others feel rushed or under-formed, whilst at times Rachel and Greg’s relationship does indeed seem to err into the clean rom-com call-and-response that we had been willing to avoid. These lanky stops, starts and shortcomings, whilst inevitably charming in themselves, ask a much more important question: is there such a thing as an appropriate way to make a film about death? Is there a filmic language in which we can approach death? Who is a film about death for: the living or the dying? Can we even make that division?

The genius of ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL is that it readily and vitally embraces the failure to answer any of these questions, or to present us with anything more conclusive than a bit of a black hole around which other things falteringly continue. The video that Greg and Earl make for Rachel is never the true centre of the narrative, and they never really figure out what to say in it.

There’s the feeling that this is a film about death made for the living, and that this is a bit of a necessary failure. Greg’s visits to Rachel frame her illness through his eyes, as voice-overs observe how quiet he finds her on particular days, or how he feels she seems to have found hope again. We inevitably root for Greg as we have more access to him, urging him to make Rachel laugh or to provide her with company in her final weeks. When Rachel tells Greg she doesn’t think she’s going to make it, this is as surprising for us as it is for Greg. When Rachel goes into hospital, her absence from the film is alien and there’s not much we can do about it. In this sense, for all her charm and charisma, Rachel importantly retains the inaccessibility of “The Dying Girl” just enough for it all to seem unfair. Unfair that everything carries on after death, and that the film (whether made for her, or starring her) was never really her own in which to communicate her own death or her dying. Again, this brilliant and important failure asks: what would an appropriate film language about death be? Who for?

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