ShortList Film Club brings you Me And Earl And The Dying Girl

Emotions: remember them? Those things we all had before the internet made it so we can only suitably react to cat videos. Well, we’ve found a film that will dust the whole lot of them down and fire them up.

We give you Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, the brilliant new indie flick from Texan director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. No, we’re literally giving it to you: it’s the latest film to be part of the ShortList Film Club, which means there are six screenings where you can see it for free. That feeling you’re getting right now is called ‘happiness’.

The film centres on the relationships between three teens: the gawky Greg (Thomas Mann), his less gawky best mate Earl (Ronald Cyler II) and Rachel (Oldham’s own Olivia Cooke) – a girl diagnosed with leukaemia. The three are thrown together when Greg’s parents – including Parks & Recreation’s Nick Offerman – force him to “be nice” to Rachel. “With subject matter like this, you can easily be sentimental,” Gomez-Rejon tells ShortList. “I never wanted to forget that there was comedy in the moment.”

And comedy there is, not least from the two boys’ hobby of making home movies parodying classic films; there’s ‘Death In Tennis’, ‘Monorash’, ‘Nose Ferret 2’ – plus 44 others. It’s a nod from Gomez-Rejon, a former assistant to Martin Scorsese, whose own classics don’t escape (‘Raging Bullsh*t’, ‘The Last Crustacean Of Christ’). “Martin really enjoyed it,” says Gomez-Rejon. “Werner Herzog liked it so much he invited me to his house for coffee."

Do you really need a better endorsement before you sign up for tickets?

BOOK YOUR TICKETS BELOW

The next batch of tickets for Brighton, Birmingham and Manchester will be released on 26 August at 3pm.

Visit the Shortlist Film Club page to watch the latest trailers and find out what's coming soon.

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