When the sixteen-year-old hero has terminal cancer about to cause a system collapse or heart attack and chemo would be the worse of two evils and additional radiation useless, there are not many ways One Last Thing . . . can go. Dylan Jameison (Michael Angarano) looks more robust than interchangeably skinny, big Adam’s-appled, sex-obsessed buddies Ricky and Slap (Matt Bush and Gideon Glick, in their feature débuts) but suffers frequent nosebleeds, nausea and weakness. Widowed mother Karen (Cynthia Nixon) is protective, distraught and ready to break, a hunky star pro football player from the same mill-town background is generous and strong to lean on, and the supermodel Dylan longs to meet is crashing downhill from metropolis loneliness, stimulants and a nasty temperament.

Throw them all together, simmer with too many black one-liners about little time to waste, and the outcome is not hard to figure. But this is America -- oil-refinery Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania -- not the postwar Japan of intense Ikiru/To Live/Living/Doomed, where a cancer-riddled civil servant creates meaning to his life but Kurosawa refuses a happy uplift windup. Coming from his first produced screenplay in Barry Stringfellow’s attempt to infuse humor to deal with his father’s death, and directed by his lifelong friend Alex Steyermark, this Tribeca Film Festival “family category” entry is predictable to its final mawkish scene. That said, however, the result is more palatable than Sarah Watt’s praised “romantic comedy,” Look Both Ways. Both seek out a light side in similar dread circumstances, but while the Australian director-writer’s intercut animated catastrophe visions are misconceived, Steyermark’s second feature’s visions of dead father Earl (Ethan Hawke) surf fishing (plus one of a suicide winking) are merely too frequent although reinforced by one real video appearance.

Judeo-Christian belief is introduced -- and rejected, in a proselytizing holier-than-thou fellow student -- and Shiva, too, the goddess of destruction (death) and regeneration (life in rebirth), and “heaven” is too cozily a prefect fishing beach. The adolescent humor around the two pals is repetitious and easy, and the New York City to which they travel for sex and the supermodel, a bit too consciously populated with loveable “Crocodile” Dundee types.

The idea is that, all dying now or tomorrow, acceptance is important and what one leaves behind in others is essential. On the truncated video, dad hints to son that he’ll soon be gone but that the woman they love should be encouraged to love a good man who might show up. This will be unmarried Jason O’Malley (Johnny Messner), the athlete the dying boy chooses to meet through United Wish Givers charity. The TV cameras rolling, however, he reverses field and reveals his deepest last wish: a weekend alone with Nikki Sinclair (Sunny Mabrey), whose swimsuit poster hangs in his room.

Poor little rich girl out of today’s fashion prima-donna headlines, haunted by the true hometown husband her blonde ambition destroyed, Nikki is now destroying self and career. Model agent Arlene (Gina Gershon) is up to here with mothering her ace meal ticket but balancing that against the loss of serious money. The teenager’s about-face dying wish is caught on the nightly news -- this is America --  so agent hustles troublesome client out there for a few seconds and cynical oodles of publicity.

The women have not reckoned on the perseverance of the three youngsters, who with Jason’s money and mom’s resigned permission, journey to a New York which recognizes celebrity Dylan from the New York Post front-page photo. With the help, sometimes hindrance, of gay receptionists, bellhops (Coati Mundi, as Edson), club bouncers (Mario D’Leon) and cabbies (Nelust Wyclef Jean, whose island-rhythm “Heaven’s in New York” buoys end-credits), the two skinny underage kids get into Skin’s gentleman’s lounge while in trendy Lot 51 Dylan is sent packing by his dream “I’m a total bitch” Nikki. But -- this is America -- pitying and loathing herself, she follows him to his hospital bed back home and thence to Conquest Beach for surf casting and more.

Of herself, “the gorgeous Nikki” had said, “I’m dead,” but Shiva and Dylan’s love bring her back. Amidst a promised casting rod, brave tears and a rictus grin “I’ve never seen anything like before,” there will be promised rebirth and love.

“I think [my pictures] ask,” according to Kurosawa, “’Why is it that human beings aren’t happy?’ . . . on the other hand, why they must be unhappy.” On yet another hand, superficially perhaps and too easily, One Last Thing . . . passably looks for some silver lining. 

(Released by Magnolia Pictures and rated “R” for drug use, language and some sexuality.)