Courtesy Summit Entertainment.

A lot of virtual ink and chatter has been spilled and offered about 50/50, directed by Jonathan Levine. The script by Seth Rogen’s longtime buddy Will Reiser is based on Reiser’s own cancer scare at the age of 24. The film is already being met with almost universal accolades that it Gets Cancer Right. 50/50 has a well-meaning script that gets a lot of the details right: of hospital life, of sickness and dying. But it’s so wrapped up in Hollywood convention that not even Seth Rogen, try as he might, can lift this out of the Lifetime Movie for Hipsters aisle.

We meet Adam (arthouse darling Joseph Gordon-Levitt) running with his iPod on the streets of Seattle. He waits at a crosswalk for a signal while another runner, like life, passes him by. This kind of obviousness pervades the movie like, well, a disease. Adam and his buddy Kyle (Rogen) work for Seattle Public Radio, where Adam has put off finishing a story about a volcano (METAPHOR ALERT). His girlfriend Rachel (Bryce Dallas Howard) is an abstract painter who is obviously unreliable even before the diagnosis, and although she pretends to put up a good front, remains as obviously unreliable as ever afterwards.

I’ve seen enough of grief and sickness to know that everybody has their own individual way of coping with these things, even if that way is to run away from it. But the double-barrel shotgun of Seattle and Public Radio makes me feel I’m not watching one brave individual deal with cancer so much as One Demographic’s Play for Market Saturation. I like Seattle and public radio, I do. But even fans of both might well suspect this particular combination is loaded a little heavy on the sensitive side. Did I mention that Adam’s father has Alzheimer’s? And his mother is Angelica Huston?

Courtesy Summit Entertainment.

The film portrays the natural awkwardness that arises around a twenty-something given a potential a death sentence at the very time of life when they feel the promise of the future. But the characters and situations seem as forced as the awkward pleasantries. While the alt-lite alternative soundtrack, hip location and cool art-opening scene try desperately to give this a “we’re so not Hollywood” air, the script is filled with much of the same rom-com and bro-com formula that you’ve seen before. It’s so warm, sensitive and earnest that you could almost swap out Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts for the leads, call this Larry Crowne and hardly anybody would be the wiser.

And yet, there’s Seth Rogen being Seth Rogen, who by now is a Hollywood convention in his own right. But dammit, amid the forced sensitivity and awareness of the Important Observations made in this film, he’s the most real thing in the movie simply by doing what he does best: playing natural. The best line in 50/50 comes when Kyle tries to get Adam to use his ailment to pick up girls (much the way the film uses his ailment to signify Real Life). They’re chatting up two young women in a booth when the wool-capped Adam cracks a joke. Kyle quickly boasts that his buddy, though he has cancer, hasn’t lost his sense of humor about it: “He’s so inspirational!” That line takes a dick-shaped machete to all the film’s earnestness, but alas it’s not sustained.

Still, as the film goes on, relationships deepen and become nearly credible, though I hope I’m not the only one concerned that the relationship is basically unethical. Adam and his therapist Katherine (Anna Kendrick, who between this and Up in the Air has a lock on the role of the Awkward Young Professional). The fumbling arc of her relationship with Adam, only the third patient she’d ever seen, is touching. Though did I mention it’s professionally unethical?

As Adam comes to terms with his disease, his relationship with Kyle grows more natural as well. 50/50 wants so hard to be good and different, but so much of it feels contrived, and typical of Hollywood the film’s emotional arc is aided at every step by a soundtrack that never lets you forget how to feel. Odds are this movie will make audience feel better than 50/50, but I could barely muster 40/60.

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50/50
Directed by Jonathan Levine
Written by Will Resier
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anjelica Huston.
Running time: 99 minutes
Rated R for language, sexual content and some drug use
Opens today at Gallery Place, Georgetown, Regal Bethesda, and elsewhere.