Forgive this ramble, but because the Dear Evan Hansen move is reportedly... badly adapted from its source, there's gonna be a bunch of people who get second-hand glib summaries of the original plot and declare it a trainwreck or problematic or tone-deaf, etc.
DEH, the stage musical, does not have a hero or a villain. It has awkward, lonely, mentally ill teenagers in our age of viral fame-chasing (the stage is filled with giant social media posts and texts) taking things too far, facing the consequences, and then learning to move on.
Evan resonates with people because of his depression, social anxiety and possible autism ("Waving Through A Window" gets me bawling). He first gets into this mess simply because he's too fearful to correct a grieving family's assumptions and doesn't want to hurt them. It spirals when he doesn't want to let go of the new family and love and popularity, and then the lie is so big it has a life of its own. No one watching roots for him to continue this way, but we still worry for when it inevitably comes crashing down. Because, when it comes out he was at his absolute lowest point and almost ended up like Conner, you understand a bit more why he would cling to the fantasy about having such a friend.
But there's no heroes anywhere else in the cast either. Everybody, save for Evan's struggling mom, uses Conner's death selfishly. Other kids at school want the clout or to feel like a special caretaker to Conner's fake legacy. Even Conner's family, who choose to believe a fairytale of their troubled son/brother because they feel guilty for just pegging him as an asshole and not bothering to help him. Which is a shame bc in one interaction Conner has with Evan, you see he did have a soft side and reached out to another lonely kid. For one second, you glimpse what might have been.
Adults play teenage characters all the time, so I'm not sure that's the movie's problem here. But movies for general audiences do rely on framing someone to root for more than in stage where rules and fantasy have a wider range to play. For film, it usually misses the feel and surreal setting of stage direction that kicks on your imagination. A good director could absolutely translate it to film, like West Side Story or more currently In The Heights. It doesn't sound like that was attempted here tho. Reviews coming out make the DEH movie sound more like the disturbing film Father Of The Year put to music.
Hollywood should just screw off and let musicals and stage plays be filmed as is like Andrew Lloyd Webber did decades ago, and Lin did for Hamilton recently. But PLEASE watch DEH in its original form, and if you need help finding that "slime tutorial" let me know.
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