In Jandy Nelson’s 2010 YA novel, The Sky Is Everywhere, 17-year-old Lennon “Lennie” Walker is grieving her older sister, who suddenly died of a heart arrythmia four weeks earlier. She lives with her grandmother, Gram, and her Uncle Big in an old house in northern California. Lennie deals with her grief, in part, by writing poems about Bailey and leaving them in random places around town. She’s a skilled clarinetist in the school band, which just welcomed a new member: Joe Fontaine, a brilliant trumpeter who moved to town from France. Lennie and Joe hit it off immediately—they just get each other, as lovestruck teens do—but things are complicated by the fact she’s also pursuing an increasingly physical relationship with Bailey’s distraught boyfriend, Toby Shaw. The book provides the basis for a new film, written by Nelson and directed by Shirley’s Josephine Decker. It premieres on Apple TV+ on Feb. 11.

Freak flags fly freely in Nelson’s book, which is fine, although it makes a few characters seem more like quirky constructs than real-life people. Uncle Big spends a lot of time up in trees, for instance, and he’s been married and divorced five times because he can’t resist the romance of proposing to girlfriends. Bohemian Gram is an avid painter and gardener who’s been known to put e.e. cummings poems or “a handful of buttons” in Lennie’s brown-bag lunches. Lively and goth-y Sarah, Lennie’s best friend, devours works by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, wears black “even at the beach,” and drives around in a car she’s named “Ennui.” Readers will eventually wish that a boring person show up, just to take the edge off.

A few other major players are so idealized that they don’t seem real. Bailey, for instance, comes across as one of the most vibrant people ever to exist—someone who “did everything: walk, talk, think, laugh, party, at the speed of light—and with its gleam.” Joe is a heart-stoppingly attractive teen who’s so exquisitely talented that Lennie has an extended hallucination during his band-practice trumpet solo: “every kid in band is on the floor in a bedazzled heap. Then the roof flies off, the walls collapse, and when I look outside I see that the nearby stand of redwoods has uprooted and is making its way up the quad to our classroom, a gang of giant wooden men clapping their branches together.” Then the nearby river floods the school, apparently. Quite a solo!

This results in a book that’s so relentlessly alive that it undercuts the fact that Lennie, and other characters, are overwhelmed with grief. Sure, Lennie writes a poem on a bench that says “I can’t shove the dark out of my way,” but in her actual life she shoves it aside constantly, finding life’s little wonders in everyone and everything. Everyone grieves differently, of course, but most people who’ve lost someone don’t carpe diem with such force.

Decker’s film similarly grabs life by the lapels in a way that calls to mind the lovely 2001 quirkfest Amélie. A version of the aforementioned trumpet-solo fantasy sequence, for example, appears in all its cartoonish glory; another scene sees Lennie and Joe, entranced by music, embraced by actors covered in rosebushes—which comes off as less creepy than it sounds. Yes, it’s at odds with an exploration of what it means to lose a loved one, but it looks so nice that one can overlook it.

Both the book and film eventually hold Lennie to account for her selfish, emotionally destructive behavior; she doesn’t seem to clock that others around her are devastated, too. However, this tough conversation comes very late in the game, which is frustrating. Still, Man With a Plan’s Grace Kaufman, as Lennie, navigates such tonal shifts well, and makes her character feel pleasingly real, despite her stylized surroundings. The Society’s Jacques Colimon gives Joe an appealing sunniness, and Dickinson’s Pico Alexander, as Toby, is suitably soft-spoken and sad—which is all that material requires of either actor. Jason Segel is pleasant enough as Uncle Big, who’s larger than life in the novel but feels underwritten here. However, the great Cherry Jones, as Gram, gives such a soulful and nuanced performance that she steals the movie. One late, gut-wrenching scene in particular shows why she’s one of the finest actors working today.

Nelson’s tight screenplay is mostly faithful to her book, although she did make a few changes. The ending, for one, is more cinematic and grand, in classic rom-com style. Another alteration, though, is a disappointment: Lennie and Bailey’s mom is dead in the film—a victim of the same heart ailment that felled Bailey; in the novel, their mother simply dropped off her kids with Gram and left, never to return. It’s a welcome recognition that sometimes even following one’s bliss has not-so-blissful consequences for others—not a romantic thought, perhaps, but certainly an honest one.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.