On March 27, 2006, I was held at gunpoint, thrown into the back of a car, and abducted.

For the next two hours, I was driven around west Philadelphia, slumped over in the back seat of a tan Lexus, with a handgun resting on my left shoulder, while the three men who abducted me cleaned out my bank account and debated whether or not to kill me.

In the end, the vote was two to one: I lived.

There’s nothing more black and white than life and death, but in the weeks after dodging death, a gray area exists. At first you feel bulletproof, indestructible.  Slowly, though, the cracks begin to show. 50/50 is about filling in those cracks.

Based in drizzly Seattle, the movie opens with what may soon become known as the “Joseph Gordon-Levitt” set: posters of Johns Vanderslice and Coltrane, massive record collection, pixie for a girlfriend. Adam (Gordon-Levitt) is soon picked up by his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen). The first ten minutes are full of fellatio jokes, and a discussion of Rogen’s favorite sexual position: froggy-style. Use your imagination.

After heading to work — at NPR, of course — Adam heads to the doctor, where he finds out he has some form of cancer that was too long for me to write down. (We later learn “The more syllables, the worse it is,” from another patient).

Adam’s friends and family respond in varying ways: Kyle uses Adam’s disease to get laid, his girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) fumbles around, unsure of her role, and his mother Diane (played expertly by Anjelica Huston) struggles with the thought of losing her only son.

And while Huston’s work is heart-wrenching, metered, and poignant, Rogen’s work is what sets the film apart. Playing a fictional version of his own persona, Kyle struggles to find the balance between humor and support, wrestling with the idea of his own friend’s death. At the same time, he’s selfish, self-centered, and only worried bringing home girls. Basically, he handles the situation like any 27-year-old.

When I was kidnapped, none of my friends knew what to do. They said they were shocked, sorry, angry, and every other word people use when describing trauma. In the end, though, they treated me like a normal freaking dude and got me drunk. It worked.

Adam is the rare indie-film poster child that you can actually feel sorry for. He’s whiney and mopey, but it’s because he has chemo-resistant spine cancer, not because he couldn’t score tickets to the My Bloody Valentine reunion. When he eventually breaks down (my breakdown was five months later on my parents’ porch, jobless, screaming and crying into the telephone to my now fiancée, who, God bless her, stuck with me), it’s earned because, well, he might not make it out of surgery the next day. It’s real and it’s gripping, and as the tears form you don’t fight them. At that point, Adam might as well be your brother.

The scenes with his Doogie Howser therapist (Anna Kendrick) are full of wit and sadness and need, the kinds of scenes that make you want to reach through the screen and hug him. The reality of death — the black and white — is clearly laid out before him; what we choose to do with the gray is up to us.