Metacritic reviews

It’s messy at times and melodramatic at others, and its treatment of mental health issues is not the most nuanced, but those feel like quibbles given the joy you can find in its best moments.

The songs are clever; the actors dig in (especially Amy Adams and Julianne Moore as Connor and Evan’s moms, respectively). And Ben Platt’s voice is undeniable, a thing of wonder, a pure emotion-delivery system. You will be moved.

A weakness for the formulaic, combined with a noticeably weighty running time, continually bumps up against the film’s many fine points.

Dear Evan Hansen gives enjoyable, tuneful voice to important modern-day concerns but lacks the dramatic and cinematic chops to really take flight.

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.

As was true of the stage production, the Dear Evan Hansen film wants to have it both ways, to see the awful lie at the center of Evan’s message of hope and to still have it play as hopeful.

The movie asks the audience to not look at two elephants in the room, and unfortunately, no amount of soaring music can relieve that heavy a burden.

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.

It’s an emotionally manipulative, overlong dirge composed of cloying songs, lackluster vocal performances, and even worse writing.

Frankly, the musical, with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and book by Steven Levenson, itself is where the fault lies. There were few redeemable qualities to begin with, and Chbosky’s dreary, washed-out direction adds nothing to its already bleak, vapid existence.