Let’s say you’re a teenage boy dying of cancer. A charity group offers to make your fondest wish come true. Since tumors don’t stop your hormones, a boy who’ll never get to be a man is apt to choose one particular rite of passage. Thing imagines such a boy (Michael Angarano), who’s determined to spend a weekend with a famous supermodel (Sunny Mabrey). Impossible? Turns out Mabrey’s character is a self-destructive drunk badly in need of good PR, and she hopes to ditch the kid after a quick and cynical appearance at his home for a photo op. He follows her to New York with the goal of inducing a celebrity to essentially commit statutory rape with him. You know how it must end, of course, as all stories of dying people inevitably do, but Angarano is no saintly cancer boy begging for your Disney tears. “If you were 10 years older,” Mabrey wistfully begins. “I’d be dead,” he responds.

Wyclef Jean shows up as a cabbie with a spiritual bent. And the less said about a half-baked romance between cancer boy’s mom (Cynthia Nixon) and a football player, the better. Still, it’s hard not to get pulled into the emotional flow before the movie’s done, and Angarano and Mabrey bring something special to the proceedings. Though one wonders when the maudlin script was written: To raise money for his trip, Angarano and friends buy time on public-access TV to auction off his possessions—including porno tapes, not DVDs. Haven’t they heard of eBay?