So William Moulton Marston is the guy who created Wonder Woman. This movie is obviously titled allusively to the comic, and is framed around it: As it starts, he’s being interviewed by one of those moral panic censors about the apparent perversions in his comic, and trying to justify it. And so each question or topic kinda triggers a flashback to earlier in his life, as we see the story of how he got from being an apparently-conventional psychology professor to being the dude who was making these not-just-apparently kinky, queer comics.

As the title also alludes to, this is really a poly love story. And the beginning of it is where the Drs. Marston bump up against not just the sexual mores of their time — which would insist that their bisexuality and non-monogamy was shocking and repellent — but against the sexual mores of our time.

Because he’s a professor and the woman who becomes the third member of their relationship is a student that he’s teaching, and who is hired to work on the research project that the Drs. Marston are jointly running. So, uh, the power dynamics there are super, super not great, and it’s extremely easy to reframe this story as one about a pair of sexual predators who sought out and groomed a young student.

Because we’re watching this through the lens of a movie that is able to show us the characters’ interiority and feelings, and because the relationship lasted through these people’s lives, it doesn’t feel like the bad thing is how it actually went down; it feels like the sketchy power and age dynamics didn’t actually play that much of a role amongst people who genuinely loved each other, in the same way that some happy marriages resulted from 1950s secretaries marrying their bosses. But of course, the movie isn’t real life, and none of us were there in the 1920s, and who knows, in the end.

Fortunately for suspension of yikes, the doctors quickly get kicked out of their university positions for the scandal of their personal lives, and so from there on, the relationship is a lot more equal-footing between the participants.

Fundamentally, then, the story is about their relationship growing and evolving, and them getting into lightly-kinky bondage stuff, and trying to build a “normal” life in a society that wouldn’t accept them as normal. I want to say that it’s a familiar story, because “people in love transgress against the rules of their society, and find their way through disapproval” is a narrative you see in a lot of stories; but I don’t think I’ve seen an explicitly poly version of it before?

The framing interview is actually a little weird, because the story is very much about all three of them as the protagonists — it may be significant that the director and writer is a queer woman — and it’s not actually just the story of this guy and his two special lady friends. But when it comes to Wonder Woman, well, that actually was mostly his thing specifically, apparently. The comics pull in elements from their life together — the kink, the queerness, the truth detecting rope (he and his wife invented a lie detector together), along with his psychological theories (which survive today as corporate DISC assessments, bizarrely) — but he’s the only one of the three main characters who’s in the framing story.

But then it turns out that the framing story is just setting the stage for the three of them to hash out a last piece of their relationship, and the Wonder Woman stuff is maybe an oversized hook in the script and title, but it’s never what the movie is actually about.

I don’t think this is a great movie; it feels a bit facile at times, and there is some lumpiness to it as it tries to work in all the origins-of-Wonder-Woman stuff, and then plus that whole “started dating when she was a student/employee” thing is really uncomfortable. But it’s a good movie, at least, and lightly recommended if it sounds interesting and you can get past the yikes.