Our Friend, (2019) Prime, directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, screenplay Brad Ingelsby, based on Matthew Teague's 2015 Esquire article 'The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word'..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Friend

A feel-good movie where everybody knows the star is going to die isn’t a good premise for a movie unless it involves Jesus Christ. In the Saviour’s case, there’s always a chance of a follow up with Resurrection 2. Based on a true story, but where everybody is pretty and glittery as a disco ball.

  Actress, Nicole Teague (Dakota Johnson) has terminal cancer in 2013. She lives in Fairhope Alabama. She tells her husband, journalist, Matthew Teague (Casey Affleck) it’s time. Time to tell their daughters, Molly (Isabella Rice) and Evie (Violet McGraw) that she’s going to die. Dane Faucheux (Jason Segel) brings the girls through. What is usually the denouement in most screenplays is both the beginning and the end.  

In a series of flashbacks, on-screen, like the departure schedule for the next flight, for example, New Orleans, 2000, signals the proximity to Nicole’s cancer diagnosis. A staccato before and after of the new normality.

Dane, for example, is in a deadbeat job working in a store. He dreams of becoming a stand-up comic and plucks up enough courage to ask Nicole out. He didn’t realise she was married. She shoots him down and introduces him to her husband. They become best friends. Nicole works hard to get another woman to appreciate Dane for his winning qualities. But any woman Dane gets involved with ditches him for not committing himself to their relationship.

Dane is shown as a depressive with suicidal tendencies. But when Nicole gets her diagnosis in 2012 and begins chemotherapy, Dane puts his life on hold and steps in to help with the girls, with Matt and with Nicole as her health unravels, and their family implodes. Of course there’s a bucket list. Dane behaves like a secular saint. His behaviour answered the question of how much or how little a friend should do. He empties himself.  

This is an upbeat film, despite, or perhaps because of, the subject. The question remains, how far would you go? Not very far is my answer. What’s yours?