Directed by Stephen Chbosky — Screenplay by Steven Levenson.

I decided to skip Dear Evan Hansen, the coming-of-age film musical based on a stage musical of the same name, back when it was first released in theaters. I did this in spite of the fact that I had heard the Benj Pasek and Justin Paul songs beforehand (and really liked quite a few of them — I know the lyrics to some of them from end to end). The story follows a depressed and lonely seventeen-year-old high school student, named Evan Hansen (played by Ben Platt), who suffers from extreme social anxiety. One day, he runs into Connor Murphy (played by Colton Ryan) — the troubled brother of Zoe Murphy (played by Kaitlyn Dever), whom Evan has a crush on — and Connor, due to a misunderstanding, decides to take Evan Hansen’s personal letter home with him. Sometime later, Evan finds out that Connor has taken his own life, and that the Murphy family thinks that Evan’s letter was left as a suicide note for the friend they never knew he had. Evan, not knowing how to get out of the situation, then decides to fabricate this lie that he and Connor were best friends, and, in the process, he gets to be a part of the kind of family he always wanted to be in.