‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’ Trailer: Not Another Teen Cancer Romance Movie
What you’re watching there is the trailer for Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, one of the most acclaimed movies of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. It won both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. The reception to the film at Park City was so overwhelming that Fox Searchlight paid a whopping $12 million for the rights to distribute the movie. (Coincidentally, last year’s winner of the U.S. Grand Jury and Audience Awards was Whiplash, which went on to become an indie hit and a multiple Academy Award winner, so that gives you some sense of Me and Earl’s potential.)
The film stars Thomas Mann as Greg, an ordinary high school kid who loves making goofy versions of classic films (A Clockwork Orange becomes “A Sockwork Orange,” Peeping Tom becomes “Pooping Tom,” and so on) with his best friend Earl (Ronald Cyler II). Greg’s parents guilt him into spending time with Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a fellow high-school student dying of leukemia. The film’s teen cancer storyline has drawn comparisons to last year’s surprise hit The Fault in Our Stars, though as the trailer itself makes clear, Me and Earl is decidedly not your standard movie romance full of furtive glances and passionate embraces.
It still looks pretty soppy though, and Greg and Earl’s movies look an awful lot like the swedes from Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Remind. but Me and Earl did go over like gangbusters at Sundance last January, and Whiplash, the last movie to follow its trajectory, was one of my favorites of 2014. So I’m still very curious for this one. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl opens in limited release on June 12.