It’s almost a rite of passage* for young Hollywood stars to do their sick-teens-in-love film before they age out of the genre. Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse take a crack at it in “Five Feet Apart,” about two hospital patients with cystic fibrosis*.

Richardson is lovely and believable as Stella, who has made herself at home in the hospital, where she is on the waiting list for a lung transplant. She has a cartful of medication and a feeding tube in her stomach. We see some of this on her video blog, an efficient way for the film to let the audience know that CF, a genetic disease, makes breathing difficult, and for Stella to call herself a little OCD*.

Stella runs into Will (Sprouse), who not only has CF but also carries a bacteria that would be especially dangerous for another CF patient. A nurse orders them to stay six feet apart, the distance a germ can travel through the air. With that premise, the film begins piling on the obstacles* facing the characters, more than one already-sad story needs. The pair can’t touch, much less kiss, without putting her life in danger. Another twist is Stella’s grief* and survivor’s guilt over the death of her older sister in an accident.

Where Stella is orderly, Will is lukewarm* about his treatment in a clinical drug trial. She is a coder; he is a cartoonist. But they begin to win each other over when she bosses him around about following his doctors’ orders. As they grow closer, emotionally if not physically, Will says, “God, you’re beautiful, brave. Wish that I could touch you.”

Then Stella suggests to Will that they break the six-foot rule and make it five.

The hospital here looks more like a luxury spa, with spacious rooms and a swimming pool where Will and Stella escape one night on a romantic date.

But as the story goes on, the film becomes more tiring than tense. Unlike the best of its genre, this film isn’t wrenching* enough to jerk a single tear.

(SD-Agencies)