The unfortunate method in which the narrative is recounted, rather than the death that prompts it, is "The Sky is Everywhere," a young adult comedy about a clarinet prodigy left reeling in the wake of her elder sister's unexpected death. Although the film's magnificent visuals may appeal to lovers of filmmaker Josephine Decker's work in particular, the narrative falls apart under its own weight rather quickly.
The devastated Lennie (Grace Kaufman), a senior in high school who closely followed the flamboyant Bailey (Havana Rose Liu), has recently lost Bailey, and her loss has caused Lennie to experience a complete identity crisis. She is unable to even play a single note on her formerly cherished clarinet, and she clumsily discards her hopes of attending Juilliard like last week's trash while snatching up the coveted first chair from a jealous rival. Only her intense affection for fellow band nerd Joe (Jacques Colimon) and rereading her favorite book, Wuthering Heights, are able to compete with memories of Bailey for her attention.
Lennie refuses to talk about her loss at home with her hippie, slightly witchy grandmother (Cherry Jones), who tends a rose garden that may or may not have supernatural aphrodisiac properties, or stoner Uncle Big (Jason Segel), who doesn't really take part in the story but rather exists in a surreal parallel universe to it. Lennie clings to denial with all she has, wearing Bailey's old clothes and refusing to clear out Bailey's belongings from their shared bedroom. She finds an ally in Bailey's grieving boyfriend Toby (Pico Alexander), who was previously her biggest rival for Bailey's attention, which ignites unexpected feelings.
At a crucial point in the movie, Lennie's best friend Sarah (Ji-young Yoo) tells her, "It's like you're someone else and I don't sure if I like her." In one of her few moments, Sarah sums up both the dramatic premise of "The Sky is Everywhere" and why it falls flat: the movie does such a poor job of portraying who Lennie was before Bailey's death that there is no context to interpret who she has become, what that means, or why it matters. Sarah's characterization only extends as far as what can be extrapolated from her theatre kid couture wardrobe.
Josephine Decker ("Madeline's Madeline," "Shirley") is an incredibly gifted director and an unlikely choice for what is essentially a commercial-leaning teen romantic drama. This is the kind of unlikely combination of the high-risk, high-reward gamble that either strikes gold or, as in this case, fails. Even yet, Decker and director of photography Ava Berkofsky (well known for "Insecure") produce a lot of stunning pictures. The same exceptional eye for unusual framing that Berkofsky showed in "Insecure" is on display here.
However, the execution feels fundamentally at odds with the clumsiness of both youth and loss because it is so refined, intelligent, and intricate. The more avant-garde elements of the film's visual design, such as animated musical notes flowing through the air and roses "coming to life" thanks to dancers in green mesh bodysuits performing an interpretive routine, are all probably meant to put spectators in Lennie's mindset. And yet, it has every flaw of the "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" that is too eccentric for its own good, which is made worse by the fact that the tactics used here often have little to no thematic resonance.
There are many lovely passages in this film that lack any sort of emotional resonance. The unpleasant side effect of how styled and regulated Lennie's headspace is is that it makes everything feel cold and sterile, especially her memories of Bailey. A lovely but flat fantasy of a girl, Bailey's sister is a crazy pixie sunbeam who sings in her sleep, dances around the streets, and eats flowers in Lennie's memories, the prism through which all of our access to Bailey is mediated. Lennie's grief also starts to feel surreal as a result of Bailey's unreality; the emptiness in her life, in her words, takes on an impossibly impossible form. It could never have been filled by a real person.
The young actors frequently come across as a little lost, and to be fair, Jason Segel doesn't do much better with a character whose every entrance is a bit of a shock. Only Cherry Jones, who maintains a grounded nature for her character and is able to sell the film's few engaging emotional sequences, is able to hold her own and avoid being washed away by the tidal waves of whimsy.
The screenplay by Jandy Nelson, which is an adaptation of her own book, struggles to support the extravagant clothing of the baroque aesthetics of the movie. Unfortunately, it serves as a perfect illustration of why self-adaptation may be extremely dangerous because she is so involved in the narrative that she includes excessive details at the price of a fascinating, more comprehensive image. The ultimate product is an especially shoddy book-to-film adaptation that resembles a video version of SparkNotes, with the plot being conveyed at double speed and losing a lot of its punch.