I won’t linger long on Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, as it elicits confused reactions from me. On the one hand, it’s clearly the summit of Young Adult achievement in cinema thus far (whatever that’s worth). Expertly shot and edited by director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon – a very gifted Scorsese protege – this feels like an “I can do anything” calling-card movie. And, yes, it’ll bite you in the heart even when you’re laughing like a hyena.
Yet the film’s main attraction is also its biggest drawback: its blizzard of clever and knowing high-tone movie references, stylistic homages and visual quotes. There’s everything from Kubrick and Brakhage to Sokurov, Roeg and Herzog and back again, which made me feel as if I was getting groped in my DVD collection and fondled in my cinematic memory banks, so busily and so thoroughly does the movie flatter the ego of its ideal viewer, the self-absorbed movie fanatic. Afterwards I fantasised briefly about burning down every last film school in America but, hey, that’s just me.
Others can hash out those contradictions among themselves. I’d rather take a detour and talk about Jon Bernthal, who has a small but indelible part as the protagonists’ cool, overly tattooed history teacher. Over the last five or six years, Bernthal has been using guest appearances like this to carve out an intelligent, oddball career that is a pleasure to behold. I first noticed him when he appeared in The Pacific, the 2010 sister series to Band Of Brothers; in Polanski’s The Ghost Writer; and then as the horribly compromised ex-cop in The Walking Dead, in which he was underused and too soon dispatched. But he stole several moments in The Wolf Of Wall Street, including the movie’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it signature scene – “Sell me this pen!” – and distinguished himself from all the other sociopathic dead-end kids on Scorsese’s riotous trading floor.
Once you become aware of an actor such as Bernthal, you suddenly notice the 10 years of work they did when you weren’t paying attention (I had this with Bobby Cannavale and William H Macy years ago). There he is in cancelled one-season TV shows (The Class) and making luminous low-totem sitcom guest appearances (How I Met Your Mother). And then they let him off the leash for his role as a hillbilly tank mechanic in David Ayer’s half-great war movie Fury, in which he produced as fine an archetypal Appalachian redneck warrior as any army – or movie – could hope for: vile-tempered, quick to fisticuffs, driven by unfathomable religion and self-defeating clannishness, but utterly reliable as a soldier. Bernthal made of him something out of Flannery O’Connor or Tennessee-era Cormac McCarthy.
Next up, Bernthal will star as The Punisher in season two of Netflix’s Daredevil. Now that he’s finally up top where he belongs, I can’t wait to see what happens next.
