At the beginning of Life According to Sam, Sam Berns is 13. He builds elaborate Lego structures and loves Dave Matthews Band. As the film progresses we learn that Sam desperately wants a place in his high school marching band’s drum line. He’s a straight-A student with ambitions to be an inventor, he says, “kind of like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs combined.”
In every way but one, Sam is like other smart kids his age. He is one of an estimated 200 to 250 children in the world with a premature aging disease called progeria. Kids with the disease have an average life expectancy of 13 years old, so Sam is already living on borrowed time.