'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl':Offbeat comedy

IF WE CONFUSE "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" with other movies famously adapted from young-adult cancer novels, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

This is a hearse of a different color, and if that sounds like the sort of awful pun you'd expect from a geeky adolescent, be advised you'll find more just like it in "Me and Earl," cleverly adapted by Jesse Andrews from his cheeky YA book.

Two of the title characters are high school boys who make impish movie shorts that riff on the film classics they watch during lunch so that they don't have to hang out with other kids.

Some of their masterworks: "Eyes Wide Butt," "Senior Citizen Kane."

Earl (RJ Cyler) and Greg (Thomas Mann) live in this movie nerd world, comfortable and insulated, until Greg is yanked out it of by his mother (Connie Britton).

She orders Greg to befriend Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a girl he hasn't hung out with since grade school. He's to do it because she has leukemia, and is lonely, isolated and unhappy.

If Greg were to make a mash-up movie about this situation it would be "Mitzvah: Impossible."

He hates the idea, so does Rachel, and their mutual, candid discomfort turns out to be a winning premise for an oddball comedy.

"Me and Earl" celebrates the awkwardness of high school life, and studiously avoids any obvious teen-movie narrative turns - Greg and the "dying" Rachel do not fall in love.

Greg and Earl do, however, invite Rachel into their cloistered world of goofy movies - she's the only person who's allowed to see them (other than us - to the delight, especially, of film buffs).

And they go one better - they decide to make a movie just for her, a venture that finds them in over their artistic heads.

Here the running movie-parody gags ("The 400 Bros") point to something more complex. We come to see that their spoofs - all snarky style and artifice - are a sign that the boys don't know how to handle the deeper feelings at work in some of these great movies.

Their project for Rachel demands more, and they're not sure they have it in them.

Particulary Greg, whose teen pose of ironic detachment starts to annoy those around him, including Earl and Rachel. Greg's behavior has also irked some reviewers, who feel that the movie focuses on his problems at the expense of other characters, particulary Earl.

It's worth noting that the movie is hip to this, and gives Greg a punch in the gut for it. (Bravo, Earl.)

In any event, Greg is left to finish the movie on his own. In Andrews' book, the unveiling of "The Rachel Movie" is a minor event, fodder for more offhand comedy.

But on-screen, Andrews (who co-wrote with director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon) knows audiences will expect to see it, and when they do, it hits hard (this movie won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival).

Still, it comes dangerously close to the sentiment of an iPhone movie commercial, a tone the movie has tried so hard to avoid.

Andrews and Gomez-Rejon seem to sense this, and give his story an utterly new ending - Greg alone in a room, suddenly aware of details that he might have seen earlier if he'd been just a bit more attentive and compassionate.

It's a second punch in the gut - figurative this time, but more likely to leave a mark.