137 min | PG-13 | September 24, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Evan Hansen, an anxious high schooler, lets a grieving family believe he was their dead son’s closest friend. The lie grows into a viral movement built on a kid who is no longer alive to deny it. The movie wants you to forgive him and never figures out why you should.
Evan Hansen is a high school senior crippled by anxiety. A letter he writes to himself lands in the hands of Connor Murphy, a troubled classmate who dies soon after. Connor’s parents find the letter and assume their son wrote it to Evan, and Evan does not correct them. He builds an entire friendship out of nothing and feeds it to a grieving family that wants to believe. The film frames this as a story about connection and healing. It is really a story about a lie told to people in mourning, and it never reckons with that.
Ben Platt plays Evan as a grown man impersonating a teenager. He originated the role on stage at an age when the gap did not show, but the camera here sits inches from his face and the illusion collapses. The performance runs on a hunched spine, darting eyes, and a voice that strangles every line. Colton Ryan plays Connor Murphy in brief flashbacks and gives the dead boy more life than the script allows the living ones. Kaitlyn Dever plays Zoe Murphy with a restraint the movie does not earn, and Amy Adams plays her mother Cynthia as a woman who needs the lie. Julianne Moore plays Heidi Hansen, Evan’s exhausted single mother, and delivers the only unforced grief on screen.
Stephen Chbosky directs from a script Steven Levenson adapts from his own stage book. The translation is the core failure. On stage, song and spotlight let an audience accept a premise that daylight rejects. Chbosky shoots the numbers in flat suburban kitchens and bedrooms, and the camera holds tight on a single performer while everyone else stands frozen and silent. The sound mix sands Platt’s vocals to a studio gloss that fights the handheld, naturalistic look around it. The result is a film caught between musical and drama that commits to neither.
The film asks the audience to root for Evan to escape consequences. It positions his deception as a symptom of pain rather than a choice with victims. The Murphys lose their son and then lose the comforting fiction Evan sold them, and the movie treats his exposure as the real tragedy. A story this dark needs a point of view about its own protagonist. Chbosky never finds one. He stages a redemption for a character the material has not redeemed.