In one of my favourite scenes in Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, the titular ‘me’, dweeby high-schooler Greg (Thomas Mann), is sitting on a hospital bed as the ‘dying girl’, cancer-stricken schoolmate Rachel (Olivia Cooke), dozes off next to him. Brian Eno crooning in the background, the room bathed in soft, warm light, it’s a lovely little moment between the two leads, the sort we’ve seen many times in film, usually followed by the guy lovingly draping a blanket over the girl’s sleeping form. Not so here: In a split-second, Greg goes from gazing fondly at Rachel to terrified by the thought that she might be dead, sticking out a hand in front of her face to check if she’s still breathing, and looking away sheepishly when it turns out she is. That one clip, for me, captures the film’s MO—while it isn’t afraid to delve into the serious business of loss and death and disease, it also eschews the conventional routes of going about these subjects, leavening them instead with quirky, self-awarehumour. At once poignant and genuinely hilarious, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is what Young Adult material should strive to be; yes, the premise might comprise somewhat over-trodden ground, and it’s not free of contrivance or the occasional logical misstep, but great casting, a sharp script and visual style help it to overcome these flaws.

The story opens with our protagonist starting his senior year of high school, one he hopes to get by under that cloak of invisibility he’s been cultivating. Greg is sort of a lone wolf, you see—it’s all part of his grand scheme to master the languages and customs of various cliques without actually becoming a member of any, allowing him the freedom to do whatever he wants—“passports to everywhere”, basically. Of course, there’s Earl (RJ Cycler), his one and only friend, although Greg prefers the term “co-worker”, in reference to the low-budget parodies of art-film classics that they’ve been making in their free time since they were kids—42 in total and bearing titles such as “A Sockwork Orange”, “Eyes Wide Butt” and “Senior-Citizen Kane”.

Plans to coast through the year in the same low-key manner that he has so far, however, are rudely interrupted when Greg’s mother (Connie Britton) informs him that fellow student Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia, and forces him to go see her. It’s expectedly awkward at first—Greg, not versed at all in intimate human interaction, just blabbers nervously, while Rachel, although finding him rather funny, doesn’t want to be pitied. But it’s clear right offthe bat that there’s chemistry between these two; the “doomed” friendship picks up the more he visits, especially after Earl and their spoofy productions are brought into the picture. As useful as their company proves in distracting Rachel from her illness, however, the fact is that she’s getting sicker every day. And Greg, who’s spent most of his life effectively hiding from the real world—having used movies and self-mockery to build a protective barrier around himself—finds that this timethere’s nowhere to run.

Granted, there are a few key plot points here that fail to convince, starting with why Greg’s mother—who otherwise insists he keep his grades up so as to get into college—is suddenly so keen on his visiting a girl he barely knows. There are also some characters that just don’t gel with the general tone; case in point: Rachel’s cougar-y mother (Molly Shannon), and Nick Offerman as Greg’s bathrobe-loving dad, both of who feel like exaggerated caricatures from a different film. Besides which, you’d be right to think that Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is yet another instance of the romanticisation of terminal illness, a vein mined many times over in the movies, particularly in the YA sphere, where a young woman with some form of incurable disease is found teaching a young man valuable lessons about life and love, helping him graduate from mindless adolescent to focused adult.

As unoriginal as the broad strokesmight seem, Gomez-Rejon— known for his work on TV and as second-unit director on big-screen features—and Jesse Andrews, who adapted the script from his own 2012 novel, create something that doesn’t go for the easy, maudlin tear-jerking that is the calling card of similarly-themed films like A Walk to Remember, or more recently, The Fault in Our Stars. Rather than laying out another hard-to-digest courtship between teen-soulmates, they focus on fashioning authentic and entertaining interactions with large doses of wry humour; as Greg keeps reminding us, this isn’t the sort of “touching, romantic story” you’re used to. That isn’t to say there’s zero pathos here—it is a movie about a dying girl, and sentimentality creeps in towards the end, but in a way that is organic rather than manipulative because by this time, you’re so invested in the characters that the lump in your throat will feel entirely justified.

It also helps that those characters are brought to life by some top-notch young talent. Mann is a natural as an awkward charmer who uses snark to conceal his lack of self-esteem, handing equally deftly the early, breezy comedic bits as well as the heavier emotional stuff to come later on. We don’t see too much of Cyler, but his laid-back, more self-assured Earl makes for a great counterpoint to Mann’s jittery goofball. Then there’s Cooke, who has the tough task of playing a sick girl who doesn’t want to be defined by her illness, tough and vulnerable at the same time, which she manages successfully. As great as they are in their own right, together they’re even better, and the film beautifully portrays the evolution of their relationship.

The visuals are another standout in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, particularly during the first half, employing the boys’ love of cinema as a way to punch in these short snippets from their uber-creative oeuvre that, along with other random inserts of stop-motion animation, give the proceedings a distinctive, whimsical aesthetic.

Indeed, even generally, the film uses a number of wacky tricks that actually feel very much inspired by Wes Anderson’s work—whether it be cheeky title cards, dramatic camera movements and long takes, or an idiosyncratic score—but with results that feel far more naturalistic and less self-consciously disaffected.

Gomez-Rejon’s film is that rare teen story that is witty without being smug, and tender without being cloying. It might not have upended the formula in its entirety, but it’s managed to lace a familiar structure with enough charm and unpredictability to make it worth our while.