Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 28% of 281 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "Dear Evan Hansen does a fair job of capturing the emotion of its source material, but it's undermined by questionable casting and a story that's hard to swallow." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100 from 48 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.
Scott Mendelson of Forbes lauded the film as an "engaging and entertaining passion play, strengthened by a deluge of onscreen talent and subtly directed in a way that opens up the play without calling attention to its stage-bound roots". Conversely, Valerie Complex of Deadline Hollywood dismissed it as "inauthentic", "shallow", and "an exercise in restraint. You either want to scream at the screen or shrink down in your chair from suffering secondhand embarrassment from these characters and their actions."
David Sims of The Atlantic opined that "almost everything imaginable has gone wrong [...] and the result is a film that [is] just painful to watch". Brian Truitt of USA Today called it inferior to other contemporary musical films releases such as filmed productions of Hamilton and Come from Away and the adaptation of Everybody's Talking About Jamie, writing, "Dear Evan Hansen frustratingly falls in between, espousing the importance of empathy and connection but in a disappointing package."
The performances were well-received, particularly those of Moore, Adams, Stenberg, and Dever. Explained David Fear of Rolling Stone, "there are enough of these goosebump-inducing, epiphanic moments courtesy of the actor that you see why people might love this film as well as cringe at it. Platt does not ruin the movie. He singlehandedly gives it a voice." Many criticized the decision to have Ben Platt (who was 27 at the time) reprise the role as 17-year-old Evan Hansen. Platt's acting was enjoyed by Peter Debruge of Variety, but he disliked the choice to cast "actors born the previous century" as high school students. Nate Jones of Vulture also called out Platt for being too old for the character, adding that his de-aging makeup backfired. He joked, "When he gets up onstage for the second act's big musical number, I wasn't sure if he was going to memorialize his dead classmate or speak on the importance of 401(k) matching."
The film's handling of its source material, particularly how the Broadway version's theatrical aspects mixed in with the film format, was generally not well received. Few critics felt the transition from stage to screen was successful, including Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times who still found the stage version better. Debruge was critical of the plotting, but gave the production crew credit for at least making some adjustments to the stage show's book, if not as many as would be desired. Less favorably, Dan Rubins of Slant Magazine and Bill Goodykoontz of The Arizona Republic felt the film needed more emotional depth for its serious themes to resonate; Goodykoontz highlighted Dever's and Moore's characters for being "the most realistically affected by what's going on in the story". Even more negatively, IndieWire reviewer Tina Hassannia and Katie Walsh of Hastings Tribune felt the source material's artifice and musical genre did not work for a mainstream film about mental health, suggesting a dramedy style would have worked better.
Adrian Horton of The Guardian, referring to Platt's presentation as a teenager, and the film's treatment of mental health, stated, "The movie asks the audience to not look at two elephants in the room, and unfortunately, no amount of soaring music can relieve that heavy a burden." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Chbosky "needed to make Dear Evan Hansen less grandiose. He needed to pick up the pace and chop 10 minutes from the running time".
Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune said about Chbosky's direction, "Dear Evan Hansen preserves many of the selling points of its stage incarnation. But 'preserves' isn't the same as 'activates.'" Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson wrote the screen adaptation left the original musical's conflicting message of staying hopeful while considering Evan's hope unwarranted. He proposed that it should have really focused on "the false cheer and heavily synthetic inspiration content of so much contemporary online life". He also found Platt's stagey acting, specifically his "highly articulated tics", unsuitable for the film format. Issues of dissonance of tone were also noticed by Michael Rechtshaffen in his otherwise positive review for The Hollywood Reporter. He wrote that the non-musical scenes especially "struggle to find an agreeable balance between the theatrical and the melodramatic".
Some reviewers took issue with the film's handling of themes related to trauma. Mendelson felt it was unsuccessful at addressing the problem. Nate Jones of Vulture labeled it "distressing, messy, full of psychological manipulation and passive aggression", and Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times lamented that it "turns villain into victim and grief into an exploitable vulnerability". David Crow of Den of Geek bashed the film as only "paying lip-service to trauma and the lonely for its own benefit", calling it more uncomfortable than watching the 2019 film adaptation of Cats. /Film's Josh Spiegel also panned the social issues portrayed as stuck in the early 2010s, which were "untimely", "ungainly", and "excruciatingly awkward" around the time of the film's release.
In 2024, Collider ranked it number 5 on its list of the "10 Worst Movie Musicals of All Time," writing that the film "strips away nearly everything that made the original so successful, removing its stage-dependent visual style and bafflingly recasting Ben Platt to play Evan Hansen despite him being over 25 years old. This jarring switch in mediums only made the issues with the film's story that much more egregious, managing to annoy both fans of the musical and those unfamiliar with the original musical." The film's portrayal of Evan Hansen was also included on CinemaBlend's list of "32 Main Characters That Are The Worst Part Of Their Own Movies."
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