Seth Rogen manages to get laughs, even in a film where his pal has cancer.
Perhaps the funniest movie ever made about someone with cancer, “50/50’’ is basically a bromantic comedy centering on a 27-year-old living with a possible death sentence and how he gets through it with a lot of support, and not a little weed, from his BFF.
Loosely inspired by screenwriter Will Reiser’s own brush with death at the hands of the Big C, it’s a tricky balancing act.
It succeeds mostly thanks to stellar work by the wonderful Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who capably handles the dramatic heavy lifting, and Seth Rogen, who delivers big laughs as his raunchy bud.
Gordon-Levitt’s Adam is a health-conscious NPR producer in Seattle who’s stunned when he goes to a doctor for back pains and receives a diagnosis of a rare form of spinal cancer with a 50 percent survival rate.
Adam’s party-hearty co-worker, Kyle (Rogen), at first sees it an opportunity to share lots of the medical marijuana issued to his pal to cope with the side effects of chemotherapy.
Later, Kyle none-too-subtly suggests to Adam that cancer is a great ploy to score with chicks.
The latter becomes necessary when Adam’s shallow artist-girlfriend finds herself unable to be supportive, to put it mildly. (She’s played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who has finally found a niche for her limited talents playing villains in this and “The Help.”)
Reiser and director Jonathan Levine (who previously helmed the weed comedy “The Wackness”) balance these high jinks with tougher-to-watch chemotherapy sessions, where Adam meets with an elderly cancer patient (the great Philip Baker Hall) who imports some important life lessons.
At first, the old man is actually more help than Adam’s extremely inexperienced new psychotherapist (the delightful Anna Kendrick of “Up in the Air”).
She struggles to understand a patient whose preternatural calmness in the face of death doesn’t match up with her training. And their professional relationship quickly threatens to develop into something far more intimate once she gives Adam her phone number.
The therapist does gently push a reluctant Adam to seek support from his control-freak mother (Anjelica Huston), who is already dealing with an Alzheimer’s-stricken husband and has no clue how to respond to her son’s diagnosis.
As funny as it is, Reiser’s script sometimes goes so overboard with the yuks that you crave more dramatic relief.
The endless oral-sex jokes delivered by Rogen’s Kyle keep threatening to bring the homoerotic subtext usually present in romantic comedies out of the closet.
At the same time, the comparatively restrained Gordon-Levitt has enough powerful (and awards-caliber) moments as a young man forced to confront his mortality to ground the film in some kind of honest reality.
Thankfully, things never descend into the kind of hokey schmaltz that Judd Apatow ladled out in the thematically similar (and not terribly funny) “Funny People,’’ which also cast Rogen as the wingman of someone facing possible death.
I laughed a lot at “50/50,” which has a dark sense of humor that appealed to me. If you’re offended at Patrick Swayze jokes in this context, you might not agree.
Without giving away the ending, I think it’s fair to tell you that I left the screening with a lump in my throat, but no tears.