Seventeen-year-old Stella spends most of her time in the hospital as a cystic fibrosis patient. Her life is full of routines, boundaries, and self-control, all of which gets put to the test when she meets Will, an impossibly charming teen who has the same illness. There’s an instant flirtation, though restrictions dictate that they must maintain a safe distance between them. As their connection intensifies, so does the temptation to throw the rules out the window and embrace that attraction.
Based on Haley Lu Richardson’s performance in “Five Feet Apart,” it is quite obvious that she was criminally underused in every other project she made before it, most notably Kelly Fremon Craig’s “The Edge of Seventeen,” in which she co-starred alongside Hailee Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson, and M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split,” sharing the screen with James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Betty Buckley. While she gave first-rate performances in each film, she was always overshadowed by bigger names but with “Five Feet Apart,” she finally gets top billing, and deservedly so.
Here, she plays Stella, a twenty-something patient suffering from cystic fibrosis who lives in the hospital where she takes an assortment of drugs for her condition. She has her own YouTube channel and keeps all of her fans abreast as to how she is doing daily and includes the doctors and nurses in her video diaries. Her best friend Poe (Moises Arias) also has cystic fibrosis and lives in the room across the hall from her and together, they both take part in new drug trials as they become available. Stella is meticulous with all of her daily routines which includes an inordinate amount of pill-popping and exercising. When Will (Cole Sprouse), a good-looking guy her own age, moves into a room down the hall, their first meeting doesn’t go too well as Stella quickly realizes that he is the opposite of her and employs a devil-may-care attitude and as a result, they go out of their way to avoid each other. For a while. But this being a love story, they both grow on each other. And on us. And eventually fall in love but not without consequences.
The title of the film, “Five Feet Apart,” actually derives from the “six-foot rule” put forth by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation which states that two patients with cf, must always keep a minimum of six feet between them to minimize the risk of cross infection. So why call the movie “Five Feet Apart”? That my friends, you will have to discover for yourselves.
Going in I was preparing to watch another movie filled with gratuitous teen angst and heartbreak and while there is most certainly plenty of that, director Justin Baldoni manages to walk a fine line between genuine emotion and constrained responsiveness. Ms. Richardson and Mr. Sprouse are both thoroughly convincing as two tortured souls who, against their better judgments, fall in love but because of their medical condition, cannot so much as even hold hands. While Mr. Sprouse has his good looks and bad-boy persona going for him, Ms. Richardson shines in a role that was tailor-made for her and steals the spotlight from everybody around her, including Mr. Sprouse. Quite simply, she is a revelation. It’s been a long time since I saw an actor in a film where I forgot I was watching a performance and here, she inhabits the role, and the condition, with passionate aplomb, reminding us what real acting is all about. There is no emotion in this film that Ms. Richardson doesn’t touch and her depiction as a cystic fibrosis patient is one of the most impressive I have ever seen and also one of the most unadorned and instinctive performances imaginable.
I was ready to write this film off as another superfluous teen love story, filled with empty characterizations and a maudlin soundtrack but I walked away from it with newfound respect and admiration for Haley Lu Richardson, an actor who can put most other stars in her age range, to shame. I am a big softie at heart and have a weak spot for love stories, the eternal romantic I am so I spent a great deal of the movie with tears streaming down my face, thanks to Ms. Richardson’s heartfelt and unrestrained performance. Or maybe it was the spicy Buffalo Chicken pizza I ordered. I’ll let you decide.
In theaters Friday, March 15th
