Yes, Ben Platt looks too old to be in high school. That’s not really relevant to the question “Is Dear Evan Hansen a good movie?”

Platt, who was 27 when he was filming the film, is of course, not terribly convincing as a 17-year-old, and many hilarious memes point out director Stephen Chbosky’s failed attempts to de-age Platt for the movie, including his awkward hunching and slouching. And it’s all true, but it’s also not important. At all.

What matters about the movie, adapted from the 2015 Tony award-winning stage musical, is the story, and whether you can enjoy nearly two hours and seventeen minutes of awkwardness and unhappiness, where the upbeat songs are about things that never happened and the sad songs are hard to sit through.

Platt, who won a Tony for the role he originated on Broadway, plays Evan, a character beset by anxiety, depression and loneliness. His harried single mom (Julianne Moore) is too busy working to do much more than leave notes on the fridge and remind Evan to see his therapist.

As school starts up again, Evan, who has no real friends in school save Jared (Nik Dodani), who is only Evan’s friend because their moms are friends, uses the school computer lab to write himself a letter (as recommended by his therapist.) Instead of the pep talk letter he should have written, he writes a letter describing his unhappy state, his unrequited crush on Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), a girl in his school, and signs it “Sincerely, your best and most dearest friend, Me.”

Evan prints the letter, but before he can retrieve it from the printer tray, he encounters Zoe’s troubled brother Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan). Connor notices Evan is wearing a cast on his arm (he fell out of a tree over the summer) and signs it. Then Connor grabs the printout and reads it, causing him to get angry and start yelling at Evan.

Connor storms off with the letter. Later, Connor’s parents (Danny Pino and Amy Adams) arrive at school looking for Evan. They tell him Connor has taken his own life, and they have misinterpreted the letter Connor stole as his suicide note, addressed to Evan. Evan tries to tell The Murphys the true story of the letter, but his anxiety gets the better of him and he can’t speak the words.

Evan gets invited to dinner with Connor’s family, including Zoe, and spins a yarn about going to Connor’s favorite orchard with him, falling out of the tree and being helped by Connor afterward. It’s all fabrication, of course, but once Evan gets going he finds it hard to stop. Eventually, he and his friend Jared produce a stack of backdated fake email exchanges between the two in the movie’s funniest number (“Sincerely, Me”) that help the troubled Murphys by giving them something from their son, who closed himself off to his family.

One of Evan’s schoolmates, Alana (Amandla Stenberg), who confesses her own mental health issues, proposes a project to honor Connor’s memory, and asks Evan to speak for him. His anxious, clumsy attempt to memorialize Connor, who he never knew at all, turn out to be rather inspiring, and his speech goes viral, spreading a message of hope that people start responding too. It also makes Evan very popular online and in school.

Of course it goes wrong. It has to. Evan seems like he would tell the truth about the letter, but he can’t. Not just because he will lose his place in the Murphy family; they treat him like a son – and as a fatherless latchkey kid, that attention is something he needs very much – and not just to keep his budding romance with Zoe going. He knows that even though everything has been built on a lie, telling the truth now will mean that the heartbroken Murphy family, and everyone who found hope and healing through The Connor Project, will lose that.

When Evan finally confesses to the Murphys (in the heart-wrenching “Words Fail”) it is the start of a precipitous decline for Evan. As low as he felt before, he must now plummet to new depths of despair. We learn that his fall from the tree was no accident; if not a suicide attempt it was definitely a cry for help.

The main message from Dear Evan Hansen, the one that makes all these dark, distressing emotions worth sitting through, is that forgiveness is possible. Knowing that you can screw up and be forgiven, that you can forgive yourself, that it is possible to move through the worst things that happen to us and that we do to ourselves. And that’s not something to mock.