So this week’s must-see “offbeat” teen tragi-comedy doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test.

Let that sink in.

It wowed at Sundance and has scored a consistent 4 stars from Mark Kermode, Telegraph Film and Empire, yet at no point do two female characters actually talk to each other.

It’s a fun, somewhat devastating, easy watching film that Peter Debruge predicts will “endure as a touchstone for its generation”. It’s exactly the sort of film we forgive for its lazy approaches to gender and race. It’s exactly the sort of film that makes me cross.

And, thankfully, not just me. The wonderfully fuming Natalie writes:

“For a film that presents itself as ‘modern’ the women in the film don’t really have scenes that don’t involve the main male character or motivations that don’t in someway relate to a man… The dying girl’s Mother is a bitter and divorced drunk who hits on teenage boys. The main character’s Mother is overemotional toward her son to compensate for her Husband who is detached and really associates himself with the cat. The main character’s atypical crush’s only conversation is to make sure he makes a film for Rachel, the dying girl, and brush her boob against his shoulder causing him to have a momentary stop-motion animation sexual flutter. And, finally, Rachel. Instead seeing how this young girl deals with the fact that her life is about to be cut very short, we see only how it affects the main (male) character. By the time we’re shown Rachel’s breakdown, we’ve had little or no time getting to know the character; therefore lack any real dedication to her plight.”

What’s troubling is that I want to like this film. I want to think maybe its opposite could be made. Me and Ella and the Dying Boy, where two oddball schoolgirls make funny movies and befriend a sick boy defined only by the number of cushions in his bedroom. Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?

And the more you unpack this film, the easier it is to rant: Greg and Earl create things while Rachel passively consumes their creations; Greg and Earl experience things (drugs, fights, friendships, grief), while Rachel licks an icecream and observes; Greg in particular gets to be funny, contradictory and three-dimensional, while Rachel and Earl are the typical, unexamined Pixie Dream Girl and unlikely-childhood-friend-from-the-dodgy-neighbourhood-down-the-road. They, along with Greg’s indulgent parents and Rachel’s flirty-and-fucked-up mother, exist only to further flesh out Greg. The film itself even recognises this, presenting Greg with his own self-absorption when he discovers Rachel’s creativity and psychological complexity only at her wake.

Have you seen it? What did you think? Am I being too harsh?