In “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” high-school senior Greg Gaines is nudged by his mother into visiting a sick classmate who has been diagnosed with cancer. A friendship develops. Although as best friend Earl cautions, Greg is not exactly comfortable with the term “friendship.”
In fact, the nascent filmmaker and astute observer of high school hierarchies refers to Earl as his “co-worker.” They make short movies that lampoon even as they honor iconic ones.
At this year’s , the movie — directed by and adapted by from his novel — deservedly won both the grand jury and audience prizes. But it wasn’t the only teen-centric movie that had festgoers mentioning John Hughes — patron saint of teen flicks — at January’s indie film extravaganza.
“Dope” was plenty buzzed-about, too. Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s commentary-homage-goof on hip-hop rides on the first-person insights of its protagonist, Malcolm.
A straight-A high-school geek with realistic dreams of a Harvard education, Malcolm doesn’t resemble the gang-banging denizens of his Los Angeles neighborhood. Or does he? That is the R-rated romp’s tease and quandary.
Both films open in Denver today with the kind of accidental timing that makes for a provocative double feature of a genre that still can have meaning.
Thanks to behemoth franchises — Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent and Maze Runner — moviegoers are hardly strangers to teen-driven, teen-marketed fare.
But something felt different about the enthusiasm for “Dope” and “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.”
Without taking anything away from their respective filmmakers, their verve and nerve, wisdom and wisecracks suggested John Hughes, who directed “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” among many others. Hughes was onto something more intimate and true about the agonies, ecstasties and goofs of the young adult.
As real as high school is for the folks surviving it, it is an unshakable state of mind for many more of us. And while genre flicks can feel decidedly same-ol’, they also can deliver the refreshed, the updated, the moment we live in now.
This week’s “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” opening brought two of its actors and its director to Denver recently. In keeping with the spirit of the film’s smart-alecky inter-titles:
This is the part where we ask, “What, no dying girl?”
On an overcast Denver morning, Thomas Mann (Greg), RJ Cyler (Earl) and soft-spoken director Gomez-Rejon sit in a green room at a local television station affiliate.
Olivia Cooke, who portrays Rachel, had been on portions of the movie’s city-hopping publicity tours but didn’t make it to Denver. She was missed, her praises sung.
“There was never a false note in her interpretation of Rachel. She’s never a victim, always age-appropriate the way she was handling the situation. Never saccharine or melodramatic,” Gomez-Rejon said. “I was after naturalism. That’s the way to make the comedy work.”
And it does.
Winning the audience and jury prizes put the movie in promising company: Last year’s “Whiplash” and 2009’s “Precious” were Park City double victors that went on to take their places in awards season contests.
It has been quite the ride for the crew since the world premiere.
“For me it was just being able to watch this movie with my mom and dad and them crying together,” recounts Cyler, sharing a high point about Sundance. “It was like an orchestra of crying. There was a crescendo. It would rise, then it would die down (he whispers), then it climaxed. Then it crashed again. They were in sync with crying, which made me cry. That was just a special moment for us, for me, watching my babies see my movie.”
You heard right. The 20-year-old actor, who strikes a tone both youthful and oddly grandfatherly, just referred to his parents as “his babies.”
This was Cyler’s debut role, and the Jacksonville, Fla., native offers up a performance that is mix of street pragmatism and an unerring sense of what really matters emotionally.
“Me and Earl” not only introduces audiences to a new talent in Cyler but casts Mann (“Project X”) and Cooke (“Ouija”) in a warm, beckoning light.
“It’s a beautiful script,” say Gomez-Rejon. “When I read it, it spoke to me as directly as it did them, I think.”
Rejon, 42, has worked on other youth-tinted fare. He directed a number of “Glee” episodes and the pilot for Fox’s youth-and-cancer series “Red Band Society.”
He was nominated for two Emmys for “American Horror Story.”
But with this movie, the Laredo, Texas, native, whom Cyler calls “Papa ‘Fonso,” has made a breakthrough — one that is generous and personal.
This is the part where we pay heed to another haunting presence.
A scene in “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” finds Mr. McCarthy — the cool history teacher with tats played by Jon Bernthal — sharing a story about loss and what endures with Greg as he struggles with his anger at Rachel’s condition. It’s a sharp gem of insight.
Even the movie’s director has taken McCarthy’s words to heart.
“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is dedicated to the director’s father, Julio Cesar Gomez-Rejon.
The long-time psychiatrist, instrumental in changing the way Laredo treated its mentally ill, died in 2010 at age 82.
“People would want to show me videos or pictures of him, and I couldn’t even open them,” said Gomez-Rejon. “When you do that for a while, you literally stop hearing them, seeing them, feeling them,” he said. He called on that sorrow and denial when working with his young stars.
“When I wasn’t quite getting there or had to deliver on these emotions that were new to me … him opening up to me about little details, his experiences made it all real for me,” Mann said.
“The making of the movie was quite beautiful because,” Gomez-Rejon said, he finally started to talking about his father. “Sundance was going to be the end of a journey.”
The success of the film has proven otherwise. “Now that I’m talking about it, I’m open to him, looking at photographs, listening to stories. I’m discovering things about him — a practical joke he played on somebody because he was very, very funny. Or a life he changed — he spent 50-something years as a physician, dedicating his life to reducing the stigma of mental illness. All of a sudden he’s very much alive,” Gomez-Rejon said.
“And the more you talk about it, it’s less about the lesson of loss and more about the love.”
This is the part where we bring up John Hughes again — sort of.
As much John Hughes as the Hughes Brothers, “Dope” teeters cleverly on the edge of parody and homage as it trucks and undercuts assumptions about race and class in the ‘hood.
It would make a fun double feature with last fall’s “Dear White People,” Justin Simien’s dramedy about a black-student-run radio program at a fictional liberal arts college.
The heroes of “Dope” are Los Angeles denizen Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his two nerdy best buds. Diggy is a lesbian often mistaken for a dude. Jib, played by Tony Revolori (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”), shares Rachel Dolezal’s fluid sense of racial identity.
When a party gets out of hand, the trio wind up with a backpack of drugs. Mixing the gestures of teen romps and “Boyz n the Hood” dramas, “Dope” poses questions — some smart, some a cheat — about identity and race in this not-so-post-racial America.
The tug of “Dope” and “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” comes in part from their hewing well to particular characters speaking to the arrested, haunted, vibrant teen in all of us.
“People asked me how it was it to play an awkward teen. ‘Were you like that in high school?’ ” said Mann, 23.
“No,” he replies. “I’m like that now. I have the same feelings I did in high school, and I think a lot of people do.”
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bylisakennedy
