Wolff plays up the goofy, injecting some much-needed comic relief.

The movie (following the book’s example) compassionately addresses the inner lives of its secondary characters, foreshadowing a life for Hazel’s parents after she passes, and giving Isaac (Nat Wolff, “Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding”), a friend of Gus’s, ample screen-time for his own personal struggles. Recall that when kids get romantic arcs in fiction, there’s usually some distance keeping their interactions away from the romance-killing gaze of their parents, but for kids with cancer, this simply isn’t an option. Unexpectedly, against all precedent, the parents are important characters whose inclusion creates an atmosphere that is believable and intimate.

The pacing is simple but effective, and the leads are on-point when it most matters. In this respect, this movie knocks it out of the park. Boone had to depend utterly on his cancer-ridden cast to cradle the emotional grenade of imminent death beside the casual reality of the everyday. The cancer movie minigenre is treacherous territory for up-and-coming directors like Josh Boone. Her mom, (Laura Dern, “Jurassic Park”), forces her to go to a support group for kids with cancer, where she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort, “Divergent”), an endearingly pompous boy who immediately starts hitting on Hazel so begins the central courtship, between two teenagers living on borrowed time. “The Fault in Our Stars” is about a girl named Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley, “Divergent”) who, apart from being a fairly normal teenager, an avid reader and an introvert, happens to have a case of Stage 4 thyroid cancer that will almost definitely kill her in the not-so-distant future.

The fault in our stars movie characters