Clouds (2020)

Clouds arrives with a terminal diagnosis, a guitar, and no apparent interest in instructing anyone about anything. Zach Sobiech is a Minnesota teenager with osteosarcoma, and the film follows him from a talent show rendition of "Sexy and I Know It" through a collapsed lung, a family pilgrimage to Lourdes, a record deal, and a final concert where the audience sings his song back at him. Justin Baldoni directs the material with sincerity and a stubborn refusal to editorialize. The illness is the illness. The grief is the grief. Nobody stops the narrative to explain what it all means about the culture.

The casting is unremarkable in the best sense. Fin Argus, Sabrina Carpenter, and Madison Iseman occupy their roles as teenagers who happen to exist, not as statements. Lil Rel Howery plays a teacher who encourages a dying student, and the film never treats his presence as a thesis. Race goes unmentioned. Sexuality goes unmentioned. The Sobiech family's Catholic faith is presented as a fact of their lives, not a problem to be solved or a platform to be built. The music industry shows up as an opportunity, which is a rare thing in contemporary storytelling, where commerce is usually a villain in a nicer suit.

There is a romance, there is a car Zach should not be driving, there are scars he cannot stand to have noticed, and the film handles all of it as private anguish instead of collective lesson. The result is a modest, sincere weepie that wants to move us and then get out of the way. It does. That is the whole of its ambition, and measured against the contemporary index, that ambition registers as nothing at all. A film can be sad, true, and well made without ever once telling us how to vote.