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In 2021, movie musicals are again the rage. “In the Heights” and “ Annette ” have already been released. “tick, tick … BOOM” and Steven Spielberg ’s remake of “ West Side Story ” are soon to follow. Back in 2015, a coming-of-age musical entitled “Dear Evan Hansen,” premiered on Broadway, and took the world by storm by winning six Tony Awards. Based on a book penned by Steven Levenson , it follows the eponymous character, a teen suffering from social anxiety, as he navigates a local tragedy for his own gain.

Evan ( Ben Platt ) wears a cast to protect the left arm he broke due to falling from a tree. He wants to talk to his crush, a guitar-playing Zoe Murphy ( Kaitlyn Dever ). But his anxiety gets in the way. To diffuse his uneasiness, his therapist suggests he write peppy letters to himself addressed as “Dear Evan Hansen.” When Zoe’s troubled brother Connor ( Colton Ryan ), however, takes one of Evan’s letters, only to die by suicide, Evan is tossed in the tumult of a fractured, grieving family. Connor’s parents believe Evan was his best friend. But the reality is far different. Evan plays along with the charade, gaining the fame, adulation, and love he’s always dreamed of. All at the expense of Connor’s memory.

Stephen Chbosky ’s cinematic adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” whereby a 27-year-old Ben Platt reprises his role as the teenage titular character is a total misfire. It’s an emotionally manipulative, overlong dirge composed of cloying songs, lackluster vocal performances, and even worse writing.

The problem with “Dear Evan Hansen” is systemic, and the film operates on faulty ground. Connor’s grieving parents—Cynthia ( Amy Adams ) and Larry ( Danny Pino )—meet with Evan under the belief he was Connor’s one close friend. Evan doesn’t put up much of a fight, which is blamed on his anxiety. But he deepens the subterfuge by enlisting his friend Jared ( Nik Dodani ) to create fake email exchanges supposedly written by Evan and Connor. The correspondence paints a picture of the pair visiting Connor’s favorite orchard, Evan falling from a tree, and Connor nursing him back to health. Cynthia and Larry completely buy the distasteful con. In his duping, Evan is revealed as a devious protagonist, and the film follows suit.

The Benj Pasek and Justin Paul penned songs, such as "Only Us," "Requiem," "Sincerely, Me" etc. are a ramshackled assemblage of garish arrangements and even worse lyrics that ring with the artificial tinge of a plastic lollipop. Likewise, there’s no amount of suspension that’ll lift anyone to the disbelief of Platt being a teenager. His very build and frame, especially his jutted winged shoulders, is that of a grown man. The one added benefit he brings is his malleable voice, a vehicle with the ability to discover pockets of hard-fought warmth where only cold suspicion exists.

Platt’s vocal performance might soar, but his choices are not merely overwrought; there are an assemblage of tics and jitters that’s often played for laughs rather than real pathos. Platt reprising his role, on the other hand, is the least of the film's problems: his character is threadbare, and there’s no amount of experience that can add depth to Evan. His task is made all the more challenging because Evan isn’t a likable character. His unsympathetic rendering doesn’t solely stem from the fact that he lied about being friends with Connor. His rot takes root in apathy, as he exhibits almost no regard for the feelings of Zoe, her parents or even Connor.

Almost no one in this movie feels like an actual person. The exception is Evan’s mother Heidi, played by Julianne Moore . Heidi is a single mom, working late-night nursing shifts to afford college for Evan. She desperately wants the best for him, even when he doesn’t notice her efforts. The musical’s best scenes revolve around her, the first occuring when Cynthia and Larry offer to cover Evan’s tuition. She’s proud. And you can see the gears shifting inside of Moore’s head before she declines. The second is the film’s most tender vocal, Moore’s Judy Collins inspired performance of "So Big / So Small." Apart from Cynthia, everyone else in this musical isn’t just inconsistent, they’re poorly drawn.

The film’s big reveal hinges on the total betrayal of a character, Alanna. Played with a modicum of sincerity by Amandla Stenberg , Alanna is the Student Body President who wants to prove that she’s worth something. In a film composed of self-interested characters, she’s the most selfless. But the writing in “Dear Evan Hansen” is so wretched, so manipulative, it needs to undermine her by dragging her down with the film’s other feckless drecks. She ultimately takes an action that sabotages Evan.

Compounding the frustration elicited by “Dear Evan Hansen” is how often the costuming, the set design, and other small details like props reveal the film’s seams. T-shirts and sweaters are hewn closer to Platt’s body to make him look younger, but they do the opposite. The bland homes of both Evan and Zoe aren’t at all lived-in, displaying very little character beyond a department store commercial. When Evan looks at his yearbook to see Connor’s favorite books, heady titles like Kurt Vonnegut ’s Cat’s Cradle appear. But Connor looks no more than 10 years old in the picture. Rather the reading list is composed of the stereotypical titles associated with suicidal teens. At every turn, “Dear Evan Hansen” takes the lower, easier route. Each time it does a disservice to the misunderstood group with which it falsely claims empathy.

With “Dear Evan Hansen,” Chbosky aims to identify with those struggling with mental health challenges, but he and the source material only possess a superficial understanding of such travails. The worst scene (among many bad ones) is when Evan gets the recording of Connor singing during a group therapy session, sending it to everyone he knows. Who videotapes a group therapy session? Who then sends that footage? It’s blatant emotional manipulation on the part of the film. Chbosky's film concerns itself solely with pulling at heartstrings, and then stamping them into the saccharine ground. “Dear Evan Hansen” is a terrible, misbegotten musical with too little self-awareness to care how out of tune it sounds.

This review was originally filed from the world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10th. The film opens on September 24th, only in theaters.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the New York Times , IndieWire , and Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the Los Angeles Times , and Rolling Stone about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving suicide, brief strong language and some suggestive reference.

131 minutes

Ben Platt as Evan Hansen

Amy Adams as Cynthia Murphy

Kaitlyn Dever as Zoe Murphy

Julianne Moore as Heidi Hansen

Amandla Stenberg as Alana Beck

Nik Dodani as Jared Kleinman

Colton Ryan as Connor Murphy

Stephen Chbosky

Writer (based on the musical stage play with book by)

Steven Levenson

Cinematographer

Brandon Trost
Anne McCabe
Justin Paul

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‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Review: ‘Wallflower’ Director Makes a Wince-Worthy Show Slightly More Relatable

Savvy young-adult auteur Steven Chbosky proves a smart choice to adapt the problematic stage musical, in which a lonely teen takes advantage of a school tragedy.

By Peter Debruge

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With “ Dear Evan Hansen ,” a divisive Broadway musical sticks its neck out in movie form, trusting a shelf full of Tonys to sweep it from improbable stage success to mainstream glory — except when does that work? In a year with a well-above-average number of musicals popping up on the big screen (“In the Heights,” “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” “West Side Story,” “Cyrano,” “Tick, Tick … Boom!”), “Dear Evan Hansen” is the farthest below average in terms of actual merit: a curve-crashing after-school special, dressed up with so-so songs (not so much show tunes as lightweight pop-music imitations), about how people process tragedy in the age of oversharing.

That said, your mileage may vary. The movie pushes all sorts of buttons — or “triggers,” as the kids are calling them these days. Where some audiences feel seen, others are bound to take offense, and that split is what makes the Steven Levenson-written show (with music and lyrics by “La La Land” duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) such a fascinating phenomenon. In theory, who better to direct the film version than “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” director Steven Chbosky, a YA novelist with a proven track record for capturing the teenage outsider experience (though Logan Lerman always struck me as a little too with-it to be a wallflower)?

“Dear Evan Hansen” rubbed me wrong onstage, and it doesn’t sit well with me now, despite a few smart improvements to the material. Baked into its DNA are three of the sins I find most irksome about young-adult entertainment. For starters, it uses suicide as a device. Self-harm is too serious a subject to be treated insincerely, whereas Levenson invents a character, Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), has him take his life offstage, and then uses that tragedy to ignite the plot. Second, pretty much everything that follows hinges on one of those elaborate misunderstandings that could be instantly clarified by a moment’s honesty. Here, awkward, attention-starved Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) allows the boy’s grieving family to believe that he and Connor were best friends, cozying up to the dead kid’s parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) and getting intimate with his sister, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever).

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Last but not least, the film casts actors born in the previous century as high school students. As in “Prom,” where the characters all looked old enough to have mortgages and children of their own, Platt, Dever et al., don’t convincingly pass as teens — and I say this as someone who adored Dever in “Booksmart” (in which she played a graduating senior). Actually, Dever is the best thing about this adaptation, which feels slightly less creepy in the lied-about-knowing-your-brother-to-worm-my-way-into-your-heart department, if only because Dever’s so good at balancing Zoe’s strength and vulnerability that the situation doesn’t read as a nearly 30-year-old creep manipulating a minor.

Just how old is Evan Hansen supposed to be anyway? There’s talk of essay contests and scholarships to pay for college, but Platt’s body language suggests someone much younger, though you could chalk that up to his way of capturing the character’s social anxiety, depression and possible autism (all of which are left undiagnosed here). We’re also told which medications he’s taking — Zoloft, Wellbutrin and Ativan “as needed” — which could be clues for those familiar with those drugs.

The movie opens with Evan freaking out about the first day of a new school year. Whereas an awful lot of the stage show takes place in Evan’s bedroom, Chbosky moves him through that familiar corridor of angst that is a locker-lined hallway and into a high-stress pep rally as the character sings the feelings he’s hiding on the inside — about being invisible, inadequate, insecure. No matter how popular most people feel in high school, pretty much anyone can relate to “Waving Through a Window.” But will they recognize themselves in Platt’s performance? The actor plays it agonizingly uptight, as if recoiling from the very peers whose attention he craves.

Overworked and under-available, his mom (Julianne Moore) has sent him to a therapist, who suggested the writing exercise that gives the film its title: Evan is supposed to address letters to himself each day, a strategy that goes south when one accidentally falls into Connor’s hands hours before the character commits suicide. His parents find the message and assume that Connor wrote it — a device we might accept in a classic comedy of errors, but which is hard to stomach in a more serious drama.

“Connor didn’t write this,” Evan tries to tell them, but they insist on interpreting the note as Connor’s last words. Maybe that happens. Certainly, the motives for suicide are rarely clear, leaving loved ones to deal with grief in their own complex ways. Adams is especially good at conveying Cynthia Murphy’s need to make excuses for Connor, to believe her son was a better person than others remember. In the movie, this desire compels Evan to go along with the charade, but never quite explains how deeply he commits, counterfeiting emails from Connor to make the family feel better.

Levenson has retooled the Murphy family dynamic somewhat, turning Pino’s character into a stepdad while preserving Zoe’s initial skepticism. She’s wounded by the way her brother treated her, as Stevenson makes the daring (but not entirely unreasonable) claim that “Connor was a bad person,” as Zoe points out — another way the script justifies Evan’s deception, by giving Connor’s mourners a more sympathetic version to remember.

In the stage show, Evan’s classmates were nearly as flawed as he was. Jared, his only friend at school (a “family friend” at that), was obnoxiously homophobic — which could be realistic, but runs counter to the faux-progressive values fans read into the musical. In the movie, Jared is gay (represented by “Atypical” actor Nik Dodani), which makes his jokes in the “Sincerely, Me” song land differently, and there are huge posters plastered around school with slogans such as “Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common. Let’s celebrate it.” The screenplay preserves its cynicism about how the social-media generation exploits tragedy (as when the kids who bullied Connor pose for selfies in front of his locker), but softens Alana’s character.

Reconceived as a cheerleader and an extracurricular overachiever who identifies with Connor’s mental condition, as opposed to a narcissist looking to ride his tragedy to glory, the new-and-improved Alana elevates the tone of the entire film. As played by “The Hate U Give” star Amandla Stenberg, she demonstrates the movie’s thesis that everyone — even those who appear to coast through high school, seemingly comfortable in their own skin — struggles with moments of depression and self-doubt. More impressive still, Stenberg co-wrote the song her character uses to make that point: “The Anonymous Ones.”

It’s one of two original numbers added for the movie, though the other — “A Little Closer,” by Pasek and Paul — isn’t especially good. Chbosky deploys it well, incorporating the song (which Ryan sings as Connor) into an extended atonement sequence, which is clearly the movie’s way of having Evan redeem himself. And it works. Even if the song’s quite forgettable, Evan emerges a more mature character. The team behind the film haven’t necessarily fixed all that was wrong with the show, but they’ve been listening, at least, and that’s a start.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (opener), Sept. 9, 2021. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 137 MIN.

Production: A Universal Pictures release, presented in association with Perfect World Pictures, of a Marc Platt Prods. production. Producers: Marc Platt, Adam Siegel. Executive producers: Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, Michael Bederman, Stacey Minidich.
Crew: Director: Stephen Chbosky. Screenplay: Steven Levenson, based on the musical stage play with book by Steven Levenson and music and lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul. Camera: Brandon Trost. Editor: Anne McCabe. Music: Dan Romer, Justin Paul.
With: Ben Platt, Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Nik Dodani, Julianne Moore, Amy Adams, Colton Ryan, Danny Pino.

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‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Review: You’ve Got a Friend (Not)

Ben Platt returns in the movie version of the Broadway hit about a lonely teenager who exploits a classmate’s tragedy.

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‘Dear Evan Hansen’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director stephen chbosky narrates a sequence from his film, featuring ben platt..

I’m Stephen Chbosky. I am the director of the film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen.” “(SINGING) Step out, step out of the sun if you keep getting burned.” What we’re looking at here is Ben Platt reprising his role that he made famous on Broadway of Evan Hansen. And in this moment in the film, we’ve met Evan already in his bedroom where he has more than communicated how much anxiety that he carries with him. We’re learning that this is the first day of school. We’re learning like just the voices in his head. And he just spins out and he started singing this wonderful song called “Waving Through a Window.” What is distinct about this scene is that he’s actually— if you look at what’s actually happening, even though he is singing, what the singing in this moment represents is a thought in his head. He’s not actually talking, you know, in the real world. Like he’s not talking right now. He’s not actually singing it walking through a hallway. If you notice, none of the people around him are dancing. It’s not “High School Musical.” There’s no performance it’s just he is alone in the world. “(SINGING) Make a sound. When you’re falling in a forest and there’s nobody around, do you ever really crash or even make a sound?” And everything that we shot, we wanted to show how he’s kind of lost in the world and how no one pays attention to him and that this entire song is a thought in his head. And in a lot of ways, it’s like a cry for help. “(SINGING) On the outside always looking in will I—” There was visual choreography. And even though the people in the hallways are not dancing, there are certain things that are hit. Like there’s locker slams sometimes on the beat. Or there’s like social media, which is an omnipresent part of the story, that are happening sometimes on the beat and sometimes it’s happening slightly off. So all these things always go back to kind of the noise in his head. It was choreographed, but not in the traditional musical sense. It was really choreographed to his emotions. That was always the main thing, the emotions. Where is he living? What does this mean? How does it affect him emotionally? “(SINGING) Is anybody waving? Waving? Waving? Whoa-oh-oh-oh!”

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Making an ungainly leap from Broadway stage to movie screen, the musical “ Dear Evan Hansen ” is the story of a liar, an accomplished fabulist who uses a troubled classmate’s self-harm to gain popularity. Yet the movie (I assume in keeping with its Tony Award-winning predecessor , which I have not seen) wants us not only to sympathize with this character, but ultimately forgive him. That’s a very big ask.

It’s not simply that 28-year-old Ben Platt, who reprises his stage role as Evan, is as unconvincing a high-school senior as John Travolta was in “Grease.” Gripped by crippling social anxiety, Evan is a sweaty-palmed mess, his darting eyes and coiled body language repelling other students as he sings lustily about feeling unseen. (The songs are mainly by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.) When a fellow outcast, the volatile Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), takes his own life while in possession of one of Evan’s therapeutic, self-addressed letters, Connor’s devastated mother and stepfather (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) become convinced that Evan was Connor’s best friend.

Rather than correct this simple misunderstanding, Evan begins to relish its benefits, going so far as to enlist an acquaintance (a wry Nik Dodani) to help fabricate an email exchange between Connor and himself. Welcomed into the luxurious Murphy home, he grows closer to Connor’s sister, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), on whom he has a crush. Students seek him out at school and his speech at Connor’s memorial goes viral. With each embellishment, the attention and social-media likes increase; only in the trusting eyes of Connor’s mother do we see the cruelty of Evan’s deception.

Written by Steven Levenson and awkwardly directed by Stephen Chbosky (who’s no stranger to teen drama) , “Dear Evan Hansen” is a troubling work, one that constructs a devious, superficial and at times comedic plot around adolescent mental-health issues. The dialogue, interspersed with hilariously on-the-nose song lyrics, is trite; yet the story shines a useful spotlight on the internet’s traitorous turns and the way social media exploits tragedy. In one telling scene, students pose for selfies at Connor’s flower-bedecked locker, conveniently forgetting this was someone they had previously disliked and ostracized.

Even with its stretched-out running time and emotionally coercive structure (there will be weeping, no doubt), this peculiar picture has a few bright spots, including a luminous Julianne Moore as Evan’s overworked single mother. Moore might disappear for much of the movie, but her one song is so genuinely moving it only underscores the emotional artifice surrounding it. Also notable is Amandla Stenberg, playing the resident school activist and moral conscience, who brings an unforced longing to a song about anonymity that she helped write. But the film’s most squandered opportunity resides in Dever’s nuanced portrayal of Zoe, whose exhaustion over the family’s obsessive attention to Connor’s needs highlights the strain of being the sibling of a troubled child. When she admits to being afraid of Connor, the moment is brushed aside as she, too, is duped by Evan’s fairy-tale portrait of a loving brother.

Treacly and manipulative, “Dear Evan Hansen” turns villain into victim and grief into an exploitable vulnerability. It made me cringe.

Dear Evan Hansen Rated PG-13 for troubling themes and shameful behavior. Running time: 2 hour 17 minutes. In theaters.

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Sheffield docfest announces 2024 lineup, including tilda swinton feature directorial debut, talks by idris elba, walter murch, roger ross williams, toronto review: opening-night film ‘dear evan hansen’.

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'Dear Evan Hansen' Trailer: Ben Platt Leads Starry Cast & Sings 'You Will Be Found'

2024 Premiere Dates For New & Returning Series On Broadcast, Cable & Streaming

The letter is found by Connor’s parents Cynthia and Larry, after he suddenly dies. They want to meet Evan because they think he was their son’s only friend due to what was said in the note and seeing Connor’s name written on his cast. Instead of coming clean, Evan fabricates an entire history that never existed between him and their son. This allows him to create the fantasy life he’s always wanted, which includes getting closer to Zoe.

The more he continues to withhold the truth, the more elaborate his lies, and soon he’s lying to everyone, including social media. Evan exploits Connor’s memory for clout. He’s famous now, dating Zoe and loved by Connor’s parents. His warped web of lies is so powerful he truly begins to believe he’s telling the truth. But his delusions don’t last forever, and when the bubble pops, it’s clear Evan had no idea of the impact his lies would have on himself and others. Sure he knew he wasn’t honest, but he honestly thought everything would turn out OK. The kid is a hot mess.

The Broadway musical is popular among theatergoers, as many found it relatable to people who consider themselves outcasts with little to no support. The show won several Tony Awards for the actors and the production. Still, it is an irreparably problematic piece of work that manipulates the audience by forcing them to feel sympathy for being a compulsive liar whose own mental illness is exploited. To top it all off, Evan is forgiven by everyone around him and sees no real consequences for his actions just because they can understand where he’s coming from?! This story is complete madness from beginning to end, but at least the actors can sing.

The film’s stars are good singers, particularly Amandla Stenberg, who has a commanding voice that stands out because she sounds natural and is the only one not pretending she’s performing at the Music Box theater in New York. The music arrangements are solid, but why does every single song start with the actor singing in a hushed, monotone voice that goes up and down until it’s time to belt those notes out? Was that a creative choice for the film, or is that how it is in the show as well? Either way, it’s frustrating to sit through that for nearly 2.5 hours.

Dear Evan Hansen is an exercise in restraint. You either want to scream at the screen or shrink down in your chair from suffering secondhand embarrassment from these characters and their actions. The story is convinced it’s making a bold statement about mental illness, finding community and class structures, but it feels inauthentic and shallow. Connor is being exploited from beyond the grave and doesn’t choose about being on the receiving end. This film won’t inspire empathy or sympathy but disdain and indifference.

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‘dear evan hansen’: film review | tiff 2021.

Ben Platt reprises his Tony Award-winning performance in this Stephen Chbosky screen adaptation.

By Michael Rechtshaffen

Michael Rechtshaffen

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It’s easy to see why the Toronto International Film Festival opted to kick off its 46th edition with the world premiere of Dear Evan Hansen . After all, what better choice to reflect the collective post-lockdown zeitgeist than the movie version of the smash Broadway musical about forging human connections in a world of loneliness and uncertainty?

Less clear is the extent to which fans will embrace an adaptation which, however heartfelt, often falls short of the intended, emotionally uplifting mark.

Dear Evan Hansen

Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala)

Release date: Friday, Sept. 24

Cast: Ben Platt, Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Julianne Moore, Amy Adams

Director: Stephen Chbosky

Screenwriter: Steven Levenson

Filmed last summer in the heat of the pandemic under the direction of Stephen Chbosky ( The Perks of Being a Wallflower ), with Ben Platt reprising his affecting, Tony Award-winning lead role, the production boasts its share of tenderly crafted moments.

Full credits

Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala) Distributor: Universal Production companies: Perfect World Pictures, Marc Platt Prods. Cast: Ben Platt, Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Nik Dodani, Colton Ryan, Julianne Moore, Amy Adams Director: Stephen Chbosky Screenwriter: Steven Levenson Producers: Marc Platt, Adam Siegel Executive producers: Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, Michael Bederman, Stacey Mindich Director of photography: Brandon Trost Production designer: Beth Mickle Costume designer: Sekinah Brown Editor: Anne McCabe Composers: Benj Pasek, Justin Paul Casting directors: Bernie Telsey, Tiffany Little Canfield

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How did Dear Evan Hansen go so, so wrong?

Movie-goers aren’t seeing what Broadway audiences saw

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In the weeks since the stage-to-screen musical Dear Evan Hansen premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, the film has endured the exact sort of public mockery that would make its title character’s palms moist with anxiety. The instant critical piñata inspired reviews and a barrage of social-media posts in the tenor of a high-school-cafeteria pile-on, with special attention paid to the “Wait, that’s what it’s about?!” premise and the optics of 27-year-old star Ben Platt still playing the role he originated on Broadway, awkward high-schooler Evan Hansen.

As more people laid eyes on the film, it became something of a sport to see who could conjure the most creative, evocative description of this bizarre man-boy. Vulture’s Alison Willmore described “the casting of an OBVIOUSLY GROWN MAN JUST HUNCHING HIS SHOULDERS” as “an act of sabotage that’s near avant-garde,” and in a particularly lacerating Letterboxd entry , Esther Rosenfield likened Platt’s body language to that of the ratlike vampire Count Orlok from Nosferatu .

There are scores of posts echoing variations on these sentiments, raising the question of how something greenlit by Hollywood on the basis of its bankable widespread popularity could have turned into such a high-profile laughingstock. (A report from The Wrap mentions Universal higher-ups feeling “hurt and disappointed at the early response” to the film.) When a Broadway smash makes the jump to the screen , it’s because executives have decided that the property is broadly likable enough to ensnare a viewership outside the usual theatergoing crowd. Dear Evan Hansen upended that presumption in swift, brutal fashion. But the fact remains that this show, with its foundation in life-affirming uplift, means a lot to a lot of people. The dissonance between its sweeping success on stage and the intense backlash it currently faces as a film has less to do with the elements lost in translation, and more to do with what the filmmakers found.

It’s tempting to write off this disconnect as the product of a self-selecting audience, and suggest that Dear Evan Hansen benefitted from its initial audiences being the tormented 13-year-olds who could most relate to its story. (Just last year, Hamilton ’s streaming debut illustrated that when a show taps into a wider demographic, it immediately faces a wider range of critiques .) But that oversimplification about Dear Evan Hansen ’s popularity fails to account for the institutional sources of approval — the Broadway production won six Tonys, including Best Musical, and some legacy-publication critics held it up as a triumph. But other coverage complicated that narrative, with some now-vindicated writers calling out the fault lines in the musical’s emotional subtext. Its problems were present from the start, but in the story’s stage incarnation, they were readily ignored or forgiven. In its film incarnation, they’ve overtaken the release and eclipsed everything else.

Evan stands on stage at a memorial for Connor in Dear Evan Hansen

The truth is, there is moral rot at the center of Dear Evan Hansen , a story about the way one boy’s suicide gives another boy a reason to live. That’s the most generous possible phrasing of the stupefying plot, in which the withdrawn Evan gets caught up in a fib about his invented friendship with his late classmate Connor (Colton Ryan). The action starts out plausibly enough, as Evan passively allows Connor’s grieving parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) to misinterpret a note found in their son’s pocket, then lets the confusion slide when he sees how happy it makes them. Before long, Evan veers into calamitous territory, as he gins up a full history of good times with Connor, inadvertently sparks a nationwide movement of mental-health awareness, and most reprehensible of all, uses his influence to strike up a tentative romance with the dead boy’s sister, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever).

Though Evan feels bad about his borderline-pathological choices, consumed by guilt and panic once his mother (Julianne Moore) starts to suss out the truth, the script barely holds it against him. After a few shots of disapproving stares, the lied-to family pretty much gets over it, and Evan ends up with Zoe anyway. The script glosses right over the fact that Evan Hansen happens to be a real creep. After laboriously displaying his vulnerable, sensitive side, the story takes the audience’s affection for granted. The lyrics, from songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, offer him comfort and redemption. “You will be found” breaks out as the show’s central mantra, like an It Gets Better campaign, retooled for depressed young heterosexuals.

For adolescents coping with isolation or alienation, it’s a potent message by design, calculated for maximum catharsis. (That goes double for junior belters; Evan exposes the sensitive soul he hides from the world during the musical numbers, able to be his best and fullest self through his tremulous vibrato.) There’s more than a whiff of manipulation to the ruthless way the show induces pathos, as if starting from the swell of tearful salvation and reverse-engineering from there. Its nearly two and a half hours of plateau rather than build, setting out to yank on viewers’ heartstrings from the self-pitying opener, “Waving Through the Window” and maintaining that grip through each successive scene. The songs, which all operate on the single setting of “soaring and anthemic,” give away the creators’ aspirations of creating non-stop feels. With the exception of an upbeat ditty that sees Evan picturing himself playing Dance Dance Revolution with Connor, every track strives for an air of the climactic. The effect is exhausting.

On stage, audiences can give melodrama more leeway. It’s a prerequisite for a medium where people express themselves by spontaneously breaking into song. The theatrical environment sells the stories-tall tear-jerking on the merit of its intimacy and immediacy, two areas where live theater has the edge on the relative sobriety of cinema. The curious case of this show’s drastic change in fortunes can be attributed in no small part to the formal transition from stage to screen, and the according shift in suspension of disbelief. Without the intoxicating energy of a live cast mere feet away, everything becomes too clear for its own good, like being at a club when the lights come on. On film, this story’s foundation of cynical button-pushing is laid bare.

Evan and Evan’s mom sit on a couch in Dear Evan Hansen

That’s far from the only shortcoming accentuated in adaptation. For all its out-of-whack notions about human behavior, Broadway’s Dear Evan Hansen was submitted as a more grounded breed of musical, a look at Real Issues facing Real Kids. The film tries to stick to this basis through its lack of dancing, glitz, and the grandeur of scale associated with Broadway. (It also comes through in the music, which has more in common with buffed-to-a-shine radio pop than good ol’ showtunes.) Apart from that wildly misconceived DDR bit, the actors saunter around charmless suburban interiors in place of choreography, the anonymous town’s middle-class homes and industrial-style school devoid of personality. But Pasek and Paul still need one kid’s moody teen years to carry weighty narrative stakes, and without the theatre’s built-in exuberance, the film has to communicate the desired intensity through strange alternate means.

Platt’s technically accomplished, otherwise disastrous performance starts to make more sense as an act of compensation. His veiny, strangulated delivery while singing is the only way he can convey his inner turmoil, working against the wooden inertia of his posture and blocking. Director Stephen Chbosky ( The Perks of Being a Wallflower ) similarly struggles to create a scale sufficient to fill the silver screen. At his corniest, he illustrates that Evan has gone viral by flinging a flurry of smartphone video responses through a black vacuum until they coalesce and form an Instagram photo. As Evan searches for hints of beauty in his school’s everyday drabness — Chbosky’s aesthetic could be fairly described as “the ‘before’ part of a commercial for mood-altering medication” — the film gets stuck in the banality he’s trying to escape.

It’s possible that an impending box-office windfall will cast these aspersions as the futile objections of grumpy olds who are out of touch with the mainstream audience’s wants. That’s how things played out with Pasek and Paul’s also roundly ridiculed, still fabulously lucrative Hugh Jackman musical The Greatest Showman. Though that film’s detractors levied charges that it was a hollow story full of fake feel-goodery (which is as close as this songwriting team gets to an authorial hallmark), that didn’t stop “This Is Me” from taking on a second life as a karaoke staple.

If cinema is, as Roger Ebert claimed , a machine that generates empathy, Dear Evan Hansen is well-oiled and operating at maximum capacity. Pasek and Paul push Ebert’s famed metaphor to its breaking point, where it begins to sound more like a diss than anything else. When doing the delicate work of courting compassion, that bloodless mechanical efficiency only leaves a person feeling used-up, and just plain used.

Dear Evan Hansen is out now in theaters.

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

October 21, 2021 by Robert Kojder

Dear Evan Hansen , 2021.

Directed by Stephen Chbosky. Starring Ben Platt, Amy Adams, Kaitlyn Dever, Julianne Moore, Amandla Stenberg, Nik Dodani, Colton Ryan, Danny Pino, DeMarius R. Copes, Isaac Powell, Liza Kate, Avery Bederman, and Gerald Caesar.

Film adaptation of the Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical about Evan Hansen, a high school senior with Social Anxiety disorder and his journey of self-discovery and acceptance.

Before saying anything, I must clarify that although I don’t despise it, I’m not going to defend Dear Evan Hansen . This musical adaptation (courtesy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wonder director Stephen Chbosky, adapting the musical stage play from a script by its creator Steven Levenson) makes nearly every wrong creative choice possible in its attempt to explore a darker side of the effects of poor mental health. I also don’t give a shit that the eponymous 17-year-old senior Evan Hansen is played by a 27-year-old Ben Platt that has played the role on stage (outdated practice or not, that casting is nothing new to me personally but in the grander scheme of things hard to even think about once the story gets to going from one uncomfortable plot development to the next). Sure, he does look silly sometimes (especially during a crying sequence that forces him to to do away with certain facial tricks and posturing hiding his age), but if I had to write one of those digestible lists ranking the top 10 reasons wrong with X, I’m not even sure the casting of Ben Platt would make the cut.

As a character, Evan Hansen makes some hasty choices under pressure for personal gain that will rub nearly anyone watching the wrong way. However, having some information regarding his current depression, social anxiety (some of the tics in the depiction here do feel a bit overboard), and aspects of his home life that leave him even more lonely, there is a degree of understanding as to why he does certain things, even if it can’t be stated enough that someone needs to slap him and explain to him that no matter how much better his life is improving, his behavior is borderline sociopathic.

Evan’s only ‘friend’ is Nik Dodani’s (also 27 in real life, yet receiving none of Ben Platt’s online dogpiling) Jared (who says they are only friends because of their parents), a jokester and nice enough friend out of sympathy, but also severely underutilized considering he’s aiding Evan with his immoral actions and, especially when the situation balloons in scale from personal to schoolwide to misguided nationwide inspiration, at any point, could have broken the façade and voiced the truth. Instead, he’s more interested in making light of deception (he forges emails for Evan, often tempted to place inappropriate jokes inside them). Towards the end, his only appearances are glimpses suggesting that, to him, none of this is his problem and that his hands are clean whether the truth comes out or not. It could be argued that he wants nothing to do with how far Evan is taking things, but he is healthy and complicit in the start of the fraud.

Protagonists also don’t need to be likable for a movie to work and say something noteworthy. Dear Evan Hansen is a distasteful view, although one seemingly with worthwhile lessons to get around to in the third act. Dealing with the fallout and the resolution is what will make or break this experience as either passably decent or bad (there are too many other mistakes along the way for the film to ever reach anything beyond mediocrity). Sadly, those last 20 or so minutes are a cheaply sanitized copout, not condemning Evan’s actions and realistically showing how his entire life would forever be a shitshow the Internet would never let down, and that would make simply going out in public difficult for multiple reasons (the most pathetically hilarious part of the ending is implying that getting accepted into any shining reputable college is a possibility). For a morally challenging movie to take the middle ground when it matters most is flat-out insulting.

It’s also baffling that Dear Evan Hansen is a musical at all (not to take anything away from the stageplay’s songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) since it’s hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to sing along with the character after the first 20 minutes. It’s less jarring for other characters, but even then, rarely does it ever feel functional here for characters to sing a song. Again, that’s also not a knock on the movie; there are a few emotionally resonant ones, such as “You Will Be Found.”

There is also dishonesty in writing Dear Evan Hansen off as incompetent or painfully horrible. Ben Platt turns in an acceptable performance albeit slightly exploitative, although its other characters such as Kaitlyn Dever’s Zoe Murphy (Evan’s high school crush that grossly turns into a potential romantic partner based on tragedy that he is capitalizing on with lies, conflicted thoughts or not) and Amanda Stenberg’s Alana, an honorable academic collaborating with Evan on an activist project for suicide prevention awareness, both dealing with complexities deserving of more time and focus. With those telling details out of the way, it’s safe to say it’s understandable why anyone would immediately be turned away from watching Dear Evan Hansen , although there is value in not shying away from showing the uglier signs of mental health and what it can bring people to do, especially when combined with other factors breaking someone down inside.

Abandoned by his father and unable to spend much time with his mom (played by Julianne Moore, she consistently works overtime as a nurse), Evan also finds the picture-perfect family he always wanted as awkward and queasy circumstances allows him to get closer to Zoe’s mom (a grieving Amy Adams, somewhat overacting but decent enough) and stepfather (Danny Pino). Of course, none of this excuses anything Evan Hansen does throughout the narrative, but underneath the questionable behavior are characters worth analyzing (especially Zoe, as Dear Evan Hansen would greatly benefit from having her immensely more likable and emphatic character receiving split time with Evan). It’s also still an unfortunate amount of narrative swinging and missing resulting in more “oofs” than a sensibly provocative look at ill mental health.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Dear Evan Hansen Reviews

I’m not familiar with the source material but I have no idea how it worked on stage… I could not get behind Hansen as a character making the entire film a giant mixed bag

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

When you are force-fed exactly what to feel and witness important social issues being used as placeholders for plot repeatedly without further investigation, you can’t help but question the sincerity of this musical flick’s messages.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Dear Evan Hansen proved to be an adept adaptation of the original stage musical but ultimately disappointing in several areas...Dear Evan Hansen just proved that not all musicals should be adapted, no matter how successful they were...

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Jan 21, 2023

Dear Evan Hansen... I cannot forgive you for inflicting the worst movie musical since Cats upon us.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Nov 12, 2022

This film is a beautifully tragic portrayal of mental health – and the importance of each life.

Full Review | Jul 18, 2022

Lively cinematography and choreography could never overcome Dear Evan Hansen's questionable narrative and wildly misplaced sentiments, or its misfire of a central portrayal, but so many of the picture's choices feel like it's writing hate mail to itself.

Full Review | Jul 8, 2022

Despite the plainness in Chbosky's direction... fans of the genre can find a genuine product that captures a time of sadness, crisis, and imposture. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 22, 2022

Just another promising project sunk by Hollywood hubris, a mediocre misfire with a few good moments that never really had the chance at being more than that, but certainly could have been so much less.

Full Review | May 19, 2022

The film reeks of a group of people so in love with the original piece of work that they couldn't even see the flaws... There may yet be a way to save this material, this simply fine film version can't do it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | May 10, 2022

The obvious solution (to the age thing) would've been to repurpose this as a iHiding Outi remake, with Platt reprising the Jon Cryer role as an adult masquerading among teenagers.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 19, 2022

Platt has a chance to showcase his soaring vocal range, but has no chemistry with his fellow performers.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 13, 2022

What we're left with is a hollow shell, a body snatcher that might resemble the show you probably paid too much to see live but nevertheless lacks its own distinctive personality.

Full Review | Mar 10, 2022

Let’s be honest, Evan’s behaviour is less-than-gallant and rather manipulative, which doesn’t help Platt’s cause.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 8, 2022

With the makeup and vacant stare, Platt looms around the screen like the villain in a slasher movie, staring unblinking as people pour out their grief. A performance that should be sympathic misfires so badly that hes given the air of a lunatic.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 3, 2022

Most of the numbers are delivered whilst sitting down or standing still with next to no visual flair. ... Like, if you took away the music and let the characters just say the lyrics as dialogue, not very much would change. Thats a bad sign.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/10 | Feb 28, 2022

"Deciphering the film's aims quickly and frustratingly becomes our only investment, and its an investment born of dismay."

Full Review | Feb 22, 2022

The film lacks the necessary energy, style, and emotional resonance to really push across its themes and ideas.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Feb 14, 2022

Dear Evan Hansen has an outdated perception of anxiety, depression, and suicide. It's shocking that this movie even got the green-light in this day and age. Dear Evan Hansen is manipulative, loathsome, and insulting.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 12, 2022

Both for fans of the play and newcomers to the story, the film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen is a complete failure.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2022

It's bafflingly shallow

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 3, 2022

Dear Evan Hansen (United States/Canada, 2021)

While watching Dear Evan Hansen , I was reminded of the 1994 film I’ll Do Anything . Originally designed as a musical (with eight songs by Prince), the decision was made in the editing room to release the Nick Nolte vehicle as a straight drama. The songs, regardless of their inherent quality, were deemed to be too much of distraction. I feel the same way about Dear Evan Hansen . The story, about a high school senior struggling with social anxiety and depression, doesn’t need the songs. In fact, they detract from the narrative. They are encumbrances. And they’re not very good.

Based on the acclaimed stage play, Dear Evan Hansen retains many of the plot points of its inspiration while making certain changes to amp up the cinematic elements. At least two problems remain. The first is the artificiality of the narrative’s house of cards. The second is that the movie does everything in its power to keep the audience from recognizing how misanthropic Evan is. In almost any other movie, he would be a villain but Steven Levenson’s screenplay goes through contortions to get the audience to sympathize with him. The film’s sunny closing scene might be its most egregious misstep, although nearly everything the entire final 15 minutes feels false.

Dear Evan Hansen starts out by introducing us to the title character (played by Ben Platt, who originated the role on stage) – a loner with only one “family friend,” Jared (Nik Dodani); a mother (Julianne Moore) who’s rarely around; and a crush on his classmate, Zoe Murphy (Kaitlyn Dever). Evan suffers from extreme social anxiety (and, as we later learn, depression). An assignment from his therapist has him write letters to himself. One day, one of those missives is intercepted at a school printer by a resident bully, Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), who belittles Evan. Later, when Connor is found dead by his own hand, Evan’s letter, which is in his pocket, is mistaken as a suicide note…addressed to Evan.

Connor’s mother, Cynthia (Amy Adams), and step-father, Larry (Danny Pino), mistakenly deduce that Connor and Evan were friends. After feebly trying to deny this, Evan falls into the role and starts spinning lies about the time he spent with Connor, including a day when they visited an orchard together. Evan is co-opted to join an anti-suicide activist group run by Alanna (Amandla Stenberg), who encourages him to speak at a memorial service she is organizing for Connor. Evan’s seemingly heartfelt speech goes viral and he becomes a social media sensation. He begins to fabricate past exchanges with Connor, acting almost like Cyrano by putting words into the dead Connor’s e-mails. All this brings him closer to Zoe and, in a moment from his fantasies, they share a kiss.

Songwriters Justin Paul and Benj Pasek have done some notable work in the past. Their screen credits include The Greatest Showman and La La Land . Based on those films, it’s possible to conclude that their strength lies in big show-stoppers featuring complex choreography. There’s not much of that sort to be found in Dear Evan Hansen ; the numbers are mostly dreary ballads and every time someone starts singing, the movie is the poorer for it.

Ethan’s crime is opportunism, but he uses it not as a means to achieve wealth, power, or fame. Instead, his goal is to achieve belonging. He’s a sad, tragic figure but the filmmakers, Levenson and Stephen Chbosky, work overtime to paint him as a victim worthy of our sympathy. When Evan eventually acknowledges the damage he has done, it feels like too little, too late. There’s a dissonance between the film’s darker subjects and its seeming desire to offer something uplifting at the end. The coda feels dishonest and makes it as difficult to root for the film’s success as it does for the main character.

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‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Review: Shoddy Direction Ruins Promising Broadway-Inspired Material

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Universal Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, September 24.

TIFF ’s second year during the COVID-19 pandemic opened with a bigger slate (132 features compared to last year’s 60) and “ Dear Evan Hansen ,” an adaptation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway hit. Thematically, a film about a teenager grappling with loneliness and mental health problems makes perfect sense for the festival’s inaugural film. As artistic director Cameron Bailey noted during his introduction to the film, the coming-of-age musical touches on feelings many people have experienced during the pandemic.

The film should be a hit: It touches on timely subject matter, the songs are by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (who have won awards for songs in “La La Land” and “The Greatest Showman”), and the stage musical won six Tony Awards. Unfortunately, Stephen Chbosky ’s poor directorial choices cancel out the rousing success “Dear Evan Hansen” was on stage, with a cascade of glaring distractions that continuously point out the artificiality of the genre.

Evan Hansen (Ben Platt, reprising his Broadway role) is a high school student with nary a real friend besides his mom Heidi (Julianne Moore), who’s too busy doing double shifts as a nurse to spend time with her son. Platt’s hunched-over, sad-eyed physicality is constantly and overtly pronounced. It unnecessarily draws more attention to the fact that a 27-year-old is playing a teenager. Platt’s larger-than-life affectations may have worked well for the stage so the audience can see Evan’s intense social anxiety, but on screen, Platt’s darting eyes are far too creepy to portray the shy, kind teenager the audience wants to root for.

(from left) Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan) and Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) in Dear Evan Hansen, directed by Stephen Chbosky.

Evan’s therapist instructs him to write letters to himself to express his feelings, and so he begins a series of letters with “Dear Evan Hansen.” His edgy classmate Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan) steals one of these letters, only to read in disgust that Evan has feelings for Connor’s sister Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever). A few days later, Connor’s parents Larry (Danny Pino) and Cynthia (Amy Adams) meet with Evan to reveal that their son has recently taken his own life. Evan’s letter was the only thing found on his person, and they (understandably) assume Connor and Evan were friends and that Connor had written the note for Evan.

What starts off as an innocent misunderstanding built on Evan’s hesitation to further wound the grieving Murphy family becomes an enormous lie. Yes, he claims, they were friends. It’s fantastical, of course, as Connor was an angry loner who let virtually no one into his life. Connor’s family, including Zoe, who expresses an interest in Evan for the first time, press him for details about their secret friendship. At some point, Evan believes the entire confabulation himself, because it has granted him the rare opportunity to be seen. The seemingly authentic story of his fictional friendship and efforts to raise awareness around mental health go viral and he finally becomes popular at school. He develops close relationships with people who accept him for who he is, warts and all. For once, Evan feels connected to friends and a family, one who has the time and resources to dote on him. The Murphys see him as the son they lost — and never had.

Of course, Evan’s terrible lie must eventually come out, and while the details won’t be spoiled here, novelist Steven Levenson deserves credit for his restraint to not inject more drama into an unbelievable story. The ending could have been anticlimactic; instead, it develops into a poignant moment between Evan and his mother, who is barely present, not only in her son’s life, but the film as well.

(from left) Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) and Jared Kalwani (Nik Dodani) in Dear Evan Hansen, directed by Stephen Chbosky.

Despite her lack of screen time, Moore’s song “So Big/So Small” is one of the few genuinely touching songs in the entire film, but that’s not because the rest are terrible (though they never reach the quality of “City of Stars” or “This Is Us”) or the talent of the performers. It’s a misfire in Chbosky’s direction. Awkward, choppy dialogue precedes many of the songs, with some lines being half-dialogue, half-lyric. The first few verses are often more talky than melodic, and while this is a common musical trope, “Dear Evan Hansen” tries very hard to increase the duration before a conversation actually turns into a song or flits between dialogue and song, and these attempts fail. There’s simply no way to blend the two. You either talk or you sing.

Indeed, the music is where “Dear Evan Hansen” will likely lose its audience. In the inevitable scene where the truth is found out, “Words Fail” is especially painful to watch, as there are so few uttered words of dialogue preceding it. This makes sense, given the gravitas of the devastating reveal, but it’s a moment better served by long pauses and silence. Instead, the forced melody destroys the emotional weight the scene should have had.

Coming-of-age movies rely on a certain level of verisimilitude so audiences can connect with the humdrum existential threat of adolescence. This is impossible in a musical, because most people don’t break out into song during fraught moments. Platt is most entertaining to watch when he’s leaning into the dark awkwardness of his character, like when he’s side-eyeing an excited Zoe as he feeds her small details he noticed about his crush, which he falsely credits to Connor.

“Dear Evan Hansen” would have been a much more well-rounded mainstream movie about mental health if the writers had abandoned the original’s artifice and adapted it for a more realistic genre, like a dramedy. But then it wouldn’t have been as exciting or life-affirming without the Oscar-bait songs, right? … right.

“Dear Evan Hansen” premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Universal Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, September 24.

As new movies open in theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic, IndieWire will continue to review them whenever possible. We encourage readers to follow the safety precautions provided by CDC and health authorities. Additionally, our coverage will provide alternative viewing options whenever they are available.

Dear Evan Hansen review: A too-old star is the least of this musical's problems

It's a testament to the songwriting prowess of La La Land duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul that Dear Evan Hansen has gotten anywhere. The story alone is so icky, so offensive, so profoundly manipulative and fraudulent, that it really never should have gotten a single Tony (or six), much less a film adaptation. Its music, however, is fairly affecting. So that's something.

In Stephen Chbosky 's film, as in the show on which it's based, Evan Hansen ( Ben Platt ) is a teenager struggling with extreme social anxiety whose therapy exercise of writing himself encouraging letters gives the musical its title. On the first day of school, his troubled classmate Connor (Colton Ryan) finds one of Evan's letters in a library printer and, outraged that it includes a mention of his sister (and Evan's crush) Zoe ( Kaitlyn Dever ), storms out of the room, keeping the letter despite Evan's protests.

Not long after, Evan is summoned to the principal's office, where Connor and Zoe's parents ( Amy Adams and Danny Pino) wait to meet him. Connor has died by suicide, and Evan's letter — addressed to Evan and signed simply "me" — was found in his pocket. Connor's parents take this and one other flimsy piece of evidence to mean that Evan and Connor were close friends, and Evan, unsure of what to do, doesn't correct them.

From there, Evan spins a wild tale of his and Connor's close bond, composing and backdating fake emails and constantly recalling a single, mostly made-up anecdote about a day they spent climbing a tree. He ingratiates himself more and more deeply with Connor's family, becomes a spokesperson for a school group devoted to mental health support and awareness organized in Connor's memory, and goes viral delivering a speech (about that same tired tree-climbing story) that crescendos into the film's anthem "You Will Be Found."

"What is the problem?" you ask. "This is just While You Were Sleeping but with teen suicide and cyberbullying," you say, as if that weren't nightmarish enough. But Dear Evan Hansen itself is as fundamentally dishonest as its protagonist, clumsily pushing every tear-jerking button and invoking every pop-psychology cliché imaginable to create the illusion of something like empathy. The empathy is not actually there — most notably not in Evan.

It's enough of an ask to suspend disbelief as the outlandish plot contrivances pile up. What's harder to swallow is that Chbosky and screenwriter Steven Levenson (who also wrote the book of the musical, for which he won a Tony) frame Evan as a sympathetic hero rather than a budding sociopath. It may be a stretch to call him a villainous mastermind, exactly, but this is not the story of a well-meaning outcast who just falls into a lie that spirals out of his control. Nothing builds to the ridiculous (and ridiculously topical) stakes of Dear Evan Hansen by accident. He does that, actively, and he does it for himself, whatever all the shots of Amy Adams' luminous, teary-eyed face may suggest.

Obviously, movies do not have to have admirable protagonists to be effective. But no real healing can come, even indirectly, of Evan's charade — he does not share a single truth about Connor, whose family clings desperately to Evan's dramatic (and false) rebranding of their abusive son — nor can any meaning come of a movie that is so insincere in itself. Just as Evan covers trauma with a new trauma, so does this glossily made, blandly designed 137-minute movie cover trauma with schmaltz.

Platt is 27 (turning 28 on the day of the film's wide release) and too old to play Evan, a role he originated (and won a Tony, Emmy, and Grammy for, though I doubt this will earn him the full EGOT). The internet made up its mind that he'd aged out of the part the second the trailer dropped, and this time the internet was right, if needlessly cruel (as usual) in its expression. The most distracting thing about Platt's miscasting isn't that he looks like he's in his 20s — most of us can sit through Grease without the experience being ruined by the fact that half the cast is twice the age of their characters — but that he's actively overcompensating for it, which has the opposite of its intended effect.

The script may have moved from stage to screen, but its star doesn't seem to have made that transition, and his performance reads heavily as just that — a performance. Considering he's an accomplished stage actor with exceptional command over his body (and over his extraordinary voice), Platt's carefully choreographed physicality of awkwardness is that much more jarring; this is supposed to be a person whose ability to move through space is about two or three growth spurts behind his frame. When you need an actor to convey, in unforgiving close-up, the ineffable adolescent discomfort of feeling somehow unqualified to simply walk to their own locker, you need to track down an actual teenager. Chbosky did not, so here we are.

As Evan's mom, the ever-reliable Julianne Moore delivers one of the film's few poignant moments in a musical number late in the film. Dever, too, finds some crumb of insight in Zoe's ambivalence about her brother's death; of the whole cast, the Booksmart actress gets the closest to pulling off a credible character in this hyper-engineered world of tragedy exploited and truth forsaken — and of songs. The songs work. Grade: D

Dear Evan Hansen is out Sept. 24.

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I feel weird about Dear Evan Hansen

The Tony-winning musical is widely beloved. Critics trashed the new movie. So what does that mean?

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Last week, as I settled into a seat at the Princess of Wales theater and pulled out my notebook before yet another screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, the nice older couple sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “Excuse me, are you a journalist?” the woman asked through her mask.

When I nodded and said I was, her husband asked me, with a hint of fear in his voice, “Did you see Dear Evan Hansen ? What did you think?”

The film in question — a screen adaptation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, directed by Stephen Chbosky and featuring the show’s star Ben Platt — had been the opening-night premiere at the festival a few days earlier. The story of an anxious high schooler named Evan who, in order to be liked, lies about his friendship with a fellow student who died by suicide, it had been one of the festival’s most anticipated premieres. Yes, I saw it. Lots of critics did.

I was still wrestling with my feelings about it, aided by a documentary about, of all people, smooth-jazz saxophone star Kenny G. (More on that anon.) I didn’t quite know what the question behind the kind man’s question was. So to spare his feelings, I hedged a little.

“It was okay,” I said. “If you like the musical, you’ll probably like the movie.”

“I love the musical,” the man said. “But the movie reviews were so brutal!”

They sure were . There’s a lot about the movie that plainly doesn’t work, and the critical response hasn’t held back. There’s just no way around some of the film’s problems. Ben Platt, aged 27, is obviously too old to be playing a high school senior, and the mannerisms he adopts to slip into the character of the excruciatingly insecure Evan make him appear older rather than younger. The direction at times seems to make things worse, with lots of close-ups on his face and a muddled sense of space.

A man with a cast stands in front of a row of bright-red lockers.

I might be able to overlook all this if it weren’t for the actual story. Until recently I didn’t know what Dear Evan Hansen was about, and when a friend explained the plot to me, I was speechless, agog, eyes popping.

Evan Hansen is a social outcast with a broken wrist who lives with severe social anxiety and depression. His therapist has instructed him to write letters to himself — beginning, of course, with “Dear Evan Hansen” — and one day he does, at school, and prints it off. The letter is picked up by Connor, one of the high school’s other (and angrier) social pariahs, whose younger sister Zoe happens to be Evan’s crush. Connor has just sarcastically signed Evan’s blank cast with a Sharpie, seemingly an overture for some kind of friendship, but when he sees Zoe’s name on the letter he flips out and storms away.

Then, a few days later, everyone discovers that Connor has died by suicide.

Connor’s parents found Evan’s letter on him — addressed to Evan — and understood it, quite reasonably, to be a letter from Connor to Evan, a sign of their close and fertile friendship. They come to Evan to talk about his best friend Connor. Swept up in the moment, Evan does not correct them. Soon he becomes the family’s (including Zoe’s) beloved source of connection to their dearly departed and misunderstood son and brother, as well as the center of a schoolwide anti-suicide movement, a role he embraces with mounting enthusiasm.

This is really dark, to be sure. It also seems like it should be satirical, or ironic, or something. Nobody cared about Connor till he was dead, and nobody cared about Evan until he was linked to Connor. The big act-one finale, “ You Will Be Found ” — which the movie plays as a social media movement that touches the lives of millions around the country — should be the height of dramatic irony. Connor, crucially, was definitely not found, and without his entirely false and frankly kind of horrifying story, Evan wouldn’t have been either. Caring about someone because you saw them sing on YouTube can be meaningful, but we all know how quickly pet causes sparked by viral videos fade away.

Yet the whole sequence is played straight. Everything does come crashing down for Evan in the second act, but nobody seems to learn any lessons except Evan himself, thanks to his mother, who makes sure he knows that she loves him no matter what he does. In other words, he was found; too bad for Connor’s grieving family and the kids at school who were affected by Evan’s lies (especially the girl who struggles with anxiety and helped spearhead the anti-suicide organization). The whole situation is weird and wrongheaded and misses several dozen points. It’s an exceptionally bizarre show.

Nonetheless, the musical was a smash hit upon its Broadway debut in 2016, later winning nine Tony nominations and six wins, including Best Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Actor for Platt. Most of the reviews were positive, citing Platt’s performance and the musical’s themes — being an outsider, preventing teen suicide, learning to accept oneself. An enthusiastic fandom sprang up online (the “ Fansens ”), many of whom hadn’t been to the stage production but loved the soundtrack and felt seen by the story.

Watching the movie, though, I couldn’t write the whole thing off.

Evan Hansen and his mother sit on a couch. She is singing.

Platt’s physical presence is all wrong, but his vocal performance is outstanding; you can see how, with the distance between audience and performer that the Broadway stage affords, his performance would land a lot better. (He did win a Tony for it in 2017.) The rest of the film’s cast is uniformly terrific, especially Kaitlyn Dever as Zoe (she’s 24, but still ably portrays a teenager) and Julianne Moore as Evan’s loving, worried mother. Amy Adams, Amandla Stenberg, and Danny Pino round out the lead cast, and they’re all great.

Then there are the songs. They are great power ballads by power balladeers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, a duo best known for their songwriting in Dear Evan Hansen , The Greatest Showman, and La La Land . Lift the songs out of the plot and they beg to be belted out at talent shows, or while weeping in the shower, or in the car with the windows rolled down. There’s an incredibly moving love song for Zoe and Evan called “ Only Us ,” with lines like this: “So I give you ten thousand reasons to not let me go / But if you really see me / If you like me for me and nothing else / Well, that’s all that I’ve wanted for longer than you could possibly know.” I mean! And “You Will Be Found” — “Even when the dark comes crashing through / When you need a friend to carry you / And when you’re broken on the ground / You will be found.” Who doesn’t need encouraging lyrics like that in their life? They’re sincere, ear-wormy pop songs.

The thing is, once you’ve seen “You Will Be Found” performed in context, you’ve popped open Pandora’s box. Zoe doesn’t like Evan for who he is; she started liking him precisely because of his lies. Evan’s been broken on the ground a lot, and it’s only when he started pretending to be someone else that anybody bothered to find him.

Those aren’t the only musical examples, but they’re the most painful ones, or at least they felt painful to me as I watched the movie. On the one hand, I felt (uncharacteristically so) a pretty sizable lump in my throat. On the other, I was livid at Dear Evan Hansen for embedding such powerful emotions — linked to themes I actually believe in, like connection and compassion and easing the burden of those you love in every way you can — into sections of the story that neutered them outright.

So that brings me back to the friendly fellow in the theater a few days later, who loves the Broadway show and is worried about the reviews of the movie — and thereby to the question that’s driven me nuts since I learned what Dear Evan Hansen is really about. Why, if this thing feels like such an off-the-wall story, is it so beloved? What am I supposed to feel about it?

Oddly enough, another film I saw at TIFF offered inroads in answering this question. It’s Listening to Kenny G (stick with me here), a documentary about the smooth-jazz sax crooner that sets out to ask a few barely answerable questions: Why do people love Kenny G? Why do people hate him? And what do their responses to him say about taste, preference, and art?

In films like Hail Satan? (about the Satanic Temple) and The Pain of Others (about women who believe they have Morgellons disease ), director Penny Lane has consistently refused to walk the easy route. There are no pat answers in her movies, and Listening to Kenny G is no exception. The sax player himself is the film’s main interviewee, but he’s flanked by music critics who point out all his shortcomings. His music refuses to engage with the history of jazz. It’s facile. It’s febrile. It’s beloved by authoritarians (one of his songs has been used for years to signal the end of the workday in China). It’s weirdly inauthentic. In one sequence, Kenneth Gorlick (the saxophonist’s real name) demonstrates how he produces his music, which involves a lot of cutting and pasting of recorded individual notes into one another via production software, totally upending the fundamental jazz value of live performance and risk and rough edges.

Kenny G, in silhouette, plays near a pool.

Kenny G’s music is sanded smooth, which is probably why he is so well known and successful. I don’t have to tell you that he’s popular, because you (like me) probably have at least one or two relatives who dearly love him, and who, perhaps, drive you mad.

Or maybe it’s you who loves Kenny G! Maybe you walked down the aisle to his music, or associate it fondly with chill evenings spent at home with a loved one. Maybe you’ve paid to attend a Kenny G concert unironically. What right do I have to tell you you’re wrong?

That’s the question Listening to Kenny G raises and doesn’t try to answer outright. Instead, I think, it focuses on a vital secondary question: Is there a dividing line between “I like this” and “This is good”? And should we care?

Listening to Kenny G rounds the bases on questions that have been asked a lot in recent decades, perhaps most notably in rock critic Carl Wilson’s book Let’s Talk About Love , in which he confronts his contempt of Celine Dion. (Kenny G also gets a few mentions in the book, in the same breath.) Wilson doesn’t conclude that Dion’s music is good; instead, after digging through the reasons people love her, he argues that we ought to interrogate the reasons for our own taste and acknowledge that not all art is alike or equal, that there’s value to making judgments.

In other words, it’s okay to say Kenny G’s music is bad and that you love it because it makes you feel things. Or vice versa.

Is Dear Evan Hansen like Kenny G? No. Or yes? Maybe. I’m not sure. What I do know is that the unabashed, unironic adoration for such a sincere yet wrongheaded musical is hard to kick at and strangely tricky to confront. I can tell you, in a review, that the new movie is bad. It’s definitely bad, taking an already morally off-kilter story and amplifying its flaws. But can I suggest that you are bad if you like it? More to the point, if someone I love says they love the new movie, or even a scrap of it, how am I supposed to feel about that? If I find myself loving it even a little, how do I deal?

All I can say, as a person paid to give my opinions about works of art, some of which are terrible, manipulative, problematic, and even, at times, plain old stupid: I have to decouple my identity at least a little from my taste. What I like or what you like tells us something about our stories — where we came from, what we aspire to, who we want to be, who we are. But in most cases, it isn’t a measure of our validity as humans. If I find myself liking Dear Evan Hansen , it’s probably because I’ve felt, at some point, like a misunderstood, ignored outsider, not because I can’t see its faults.

Does that mean the things you and I love are de facto good ? Absolutely not. I believe, in a deeply subjective and contextualized way, in some works of art being well made while others are not. And I will argue for the importance of acknowledging that distinction. I think the reason we all are obsessed with being critics — and even the most ardent fan is, in the end, engaging in criticism when they support their faves — is that we all believe this.

But the fan/stan mindset fostered by internet partisanship and savvy corporate marketing can, at times, tip over into demanding we make a false equivalence between “I liked it” and “it’s good.” If you like Dear Evan Hansen , its fans may claim, you’re obligated to praise it to your friends (or, in my case, give it a four-star review). That’s just plain silly and dangerous and, in the end, anti-art. It keeps us from frankly understanding the failings and triumphs in art, and prevents us from being able to listen to one another.

Friendly Canadian man, wherever you are, I hope you enjoy the Dear Evan Hansen movie. I hope it stirs your soul. It stirred mine a little, and I didn’t arrive in the theater with the same associations you did. I hope you cry and feel glad you saw it, and don’t feel bad about yourself because critics had some brutal things to say about it.

I also hope you and I both are excited about the power of criticism, when it takes the things we love seriously, to help us sort through our emotions and know ourselves. After all, if I claim to love something and yet get mad if someone else says it could be better, do I really love it? Or do I want it to just serve my needs? Do I think of it as art, something important and transcendent, or just some content for me to swallow whole and leave undigested? Do I take that critical assessment as criticism of me personally, or as a collective project to ask for art to always be getting better?

Boy, that sounds idealistic now that I write it down. But if it’s not real, I don’t know what we’re doing here. Art is one of the few places where we can find each other, meet each other, argue with each other, and start to understand how we see one another. If that means taking Dear Evan Hansen and the music of Kenny G seriously — and seriously grappling with what they miss — I’m here for it. Art is nothing if we don’t take it in with other people. It is, I guess, where we’re found.

Dear Evan Hansen and Listening to Kenny G premiered at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Dear Evan Hansen opens in theaters on September 24. Listening to Kenny G premieres on HBO this fall.

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Review: In ‘Dear Evan Hansen,’ a Broadway hit ages poorly

This mage released by Universal Pictures shows Colton Ryan, left, and Ben Platt in a scene from “Dear Evan Hansen.” (Erika Doss/Universal Pictures via AP)

This mage released by Universal Pictures shows Ben Platt, left, and Nik Dodani in a scene from “Dear Evan Hansen.” (Erika Doss/Universal Pictures via AP)

This mage released by Universal Pictures shows Ben Platt, left, and Julianne Moore in a scene from “Dear Evan Hansen.” (Erika Doss/Universal Pictures via AP)

This mage released by Universal Pictures shows Ben Platt, left, and Amandla Stenberg in a scene from “Dear Evan Hansen.” (Erika Doss/Universal Pictures via AP)

This mage released by Universal Pictures shows Ben Platt in a scene from “Dear Evan Hansen.” (Erika Doss/Universal Pictures via AP)

This mage released by Universal Pictures shows Amy Adams, left, and Danny Pino in a scene from “Dear Evan Hansen.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This mage released by Universal Pictures shows Kaitlyn Dever, left, and Ben Platt in a scene from “Dear Evan Hansen.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

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The journey from stage to screen, so often a perilous one, has been particularly bumpy for “Dear Evan Hansen.”

The Broadway show , starring Ben Platt as a lonely, anxiety-racked teenager who turns into a social media sensation after exaggerating his friendship with another, more hostile loner who kills himself, was an overwhelming hit. It won six Tony Awards in 2017 , including best new musical and acting honors for Platt’s star-making performance. Here, from book writer Steven Levenson and songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“La La Land”), was a Broadway musical that didn’t sugarcoat adolescent pain, grief or yearning for acceptance.

But when Stephen Chbosky’s film adaptation debuted earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, much of the love for “Dear Evan Hansen” had seemingly evaporated. The film tweaks the musical in a handful of ways but it’s largely quite faithful to the stage show. The script and songs again come from Levenson, Pasek and Paul. Platt reprises the role of Evan.

So what happened? Did two sets of critics see nearly the same thing and draw vastly different conclusions? Was “Dear Evan Hansen,” like its central character, a viral phenomenon under false premises, only to eventually have its flaws revealed?

The answer, I think, is a bit of both. “Dear Evan Hansen,” like a star-studded after-school special, is laudable for its good intentions — for the way it tries to bring empathy to all of the characters it touches in a high-school world only made more treacherous by social media. That, alone, ought to make “Dear Evan Hansen” recommendable to a wide spectrum of young people who will find uplift and support in its “it gets better” message. It is also, as you might expect in any story that uses a minor character’s suicide as a springboard for the protagonist’s redemption arc, a coming-of-age morality tale that doesn’t always have a firm grasp of its own melodramatic manipulations.

But what most troubles “Dear Evan Hansen,” I think, is what’s bedeviled so many musical adaptions before it: the heavy lift from an isolated stage setting to a physical reality. The pressures of are only greater on “Dear Evan Hansen” because it’s sincerely trying to capture an emotional realism. But in a more recognizably “real world,” the false notes of “Dear Evan Hansen” ring louder.

And nothing is more offkey than Platt’s performance. The 27-year-old Platt, gifted as he is as an actor, is a decade too old for the character. While such discrepancies can sometimes be masked or overlooked, it’s fatal in the case of “Dear Evan Hansen.” It’s not hard to see why the filmmakers would be drawn to casting Platt in the role he defined; particularly in song, he soars. But the ways he’s been aged down — the curly hair, the hunched shoulders, the striped polo shirt — only enhance the mismatch. For much of the film, it’s difficult not to imagine the “Saturday Night Live” sketch that’s probably already being written. More than the age difference, though, Platt’s performance is a constant reminder of Broadway artificiality in a movie striving for something real.

Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Wonder”) seems perfectly suited to the material as a filmmaker who specializes in both young life and multi-generational tales of empathy. And he has peopled the film with a number of terrific actors, including Kaitlyn Dever, Julianne Moore, Amandla Stenberg and Amy Adams.

The film begins with Evan writing a letter to himself at the direction of his therapist. “Dear Evan Hansen,” he writes. “Today is going to be an amazing day and here’s why.” At school, Evan’s only friend (Nik Dodani) insists he’s only a “family friend.” Both his solitude and awkwardness are total. One day in the library, he has an exchange with schoolmate Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan) who steals Evan’s letter from the printer and, with ironic menace, writes his name on Evan’s cast. When Connor takes his life, his parents (Adams, Danny Pino) find Evan’s letter in his pocket and assume it was written by Connor. The mother is desperate to latch on to something happy in her son’s life, and Evan can’t bring himself to tell her the truth.

A well-intentioned lie leads to many more, and Evan soon finds himself nearly part of Connor’s family, which includes his sister (Dever, especially good). Evan becomes an increasingly celebrated spokesman for Connor in death. It’s all a lie, one which will ultimately crumble, but there’s truth in it for Evan. When he speaks of Connor’s loneliness, he’s talking about himself. Very much to the film’s credit, it ultimately doesn’t suggest social media fame brings any salvation, and instead draws out a third-act atonement for Evan. The film, which cuts four songs from the stage show, seems plainly alert to improving some of the musical’s inherent issues.

Just as Broadway is opening up, scores of musicals have been landing on screens. Lately there’s been “In the Heights,” a live taping of “Come From Away” and “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.” Soon there will be “Tick, Tick ... Boom!” “Cyrano” and “West Side Story.” In between, “Dear Evan Hansen” will probably go down as a cautionary tale. Not every stage hit looks quite so good in close-up.

“Dear Evan Hansen,” a Universal Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for thematic material involving suicide, brief strong language and some suggestive references. Running time: 137 minutes. Two stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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Review: Dear Evan Hansen
Dear Evan Hansen Review
[FILM REVIEW] DEAR EVAN HANSEN Review (2021)
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‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Takes Its Characters on a Journey Through Depression

COMMENTS

Official Discussion
Click here to see the rankings for every poll done. Summary: Film adaptation of the Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical about Evan Hansen, a high school senior with Social Anxiety disorder and his journey of self-discovery and acceptance following the suicide of a fellow classmate. Director: Stephen Chbosky. Writers:
Dear Evan Hansen movie review (2021)
In 2021, movie musicals are again the rage. "In the Heights" and "Annette" have already been released. "tick, tick … BOOM" and Steven Spielberg's remake of "West Side Story" are soon to follow. Back in 2015, a coming-of-age musical entitled "Dear Evan Hansen," premiered on Broadway, and took the world by storm by winning six Tony Awards.
'Dear Evan Hansen' Review: A Wince-Worthy Show Winds Up More ...
The movie opens with Evan freaking out about the first day of a new school year. Whereas an awful lot of the stage show takes place in Evan's bedroom, Chbosky moves him through that familiar ...
'Dear Evan Hansen' Review: You've Got a Friend (Not)
Treacly and manipulative, "Dear Evan Hansen" turns villain into victim and grief into an exploitable vulnerability. It made me cringe. Rated PG-13 for troubling themes and shameful behavior ...
'Dear Evan Hansen' Movie Review: Ben Platt In Musical Adaptation
Dear Evan Hansen is Hollywood's newest entry on the road to reviving the musical genre. The Broadway musical by musicians and lyricist Benj Pasek and Justin Paul is coming to the big screen via ...
'Dear Evan Hansen': Film Review
Release date: Friday, Sept. 24. Cast: Ben Platt, Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Julianne Moore, Amy Adams. Director: Stephen Chbosky. Screenwriter: Steven Levenson. Rated PG-13, 2 hours 17 ...
Dear Evan Hansen
Rated: 3/5 • Jul 25, 2023. Rated: 6.5/10 • Jan 21, 2023. The breathtaking, generation-defining Broadway phenomenon becomes a soaring cinematic event as Tony, Grammy and Emmy Award winner Ben ...
Dear Evan Hansen review: Ben Platt leads a musical with a rotten core
Dear Evan Hansen got great reviews on Broadway and made Benj Pasek and Justin Paul go-to songwriters. But was its message and themes always bad? The new movie version, released in theaters in ...
Movie Review
Dear Evan Hansen, 2021. Directed by Stephen Chbosky. Starring Ben Platt, Amy Adams, Kaitlyn Dever, Julianne Moore, Amandla Stenberg, Nik Dodani, Colton Ryan, Danny ...
Dear Evan Hansen
Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Feb 14, 2022. Jeff Nelson DVDTalk.com. Dear Evan Hansen has an outdated perception of anxiety, depression, and suicide. It's shocking that this movie even got ...
Dear Evan Hansen
The film's sunny closing scene might be its most egregious misstep, although nearly everything the entire final 15 minutes feels false. Dear Evan Hansen wades into some deep waters, addressing issues of teen mental health and suicide and the power of social media. When the characters stop singing long enough to dig into the drama, there are ...
Dear Evan Hansen critic reviews
Sep 27, 2021. You see Evan Hansen, all of his flaws and desires and self-loathing laid bare. And there are enough of these goosebump-inducing, epiphanic moments courtesy of the actor that you see why people might love this film as well as cringe at it. Platt does not ruin the movie. He singlehandedly gives it a voice.
'Dear Evan Hansen' Review: Shoddy Direction Ruins ...
"Dear Evan Hansen" would have been a much more well-rounded mainstream movie about mental health if the writers had abandoned the original's artifice and adapted it for a more realistic ...
Dear Evan Hansen review: Ben Platt is too old, but the script is worse
Dear Evan Hansen. review: A too-old star is the least of this musical's problems. It's a testament to the songwriting prowess of La La Land duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul that Dear Evan Hansen has ...
Dear Evan Hansen: I feel weird about it
Evan Hansen is a social outcast with a broken wrist who lives with severe social anxiety and depression. His therapist has instructed him to write letters to himself — beginning, of course, with ...
Review: In 'Dear Evan Hansen,' a Broadway hit ages poorly
The journey from stage to screen, so often a perilous one, has been particularly bumpy for "Dear Evan Hansen.". The Broadway show, starring Ben Platt as a lonely, anxiety-racked teenager who turns into a social media sensation after exaggerating his friendship with another, more hostile loner who kills himself, was an overwhelming hit.It won six Tony Awards in 2017, including best new ...

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Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (opener), Sept. 9, 2021. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 137 MIN.

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Dear Evan Hansen Reviews

Dear Evan Hansen (United States/Canada, 2021)

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‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Review: Shoddy Direction Ruins Promising Broadway-Inspired Material

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Dear Evan Hansen review: A too-old star is the least of this musical's problems

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