So the backstory of this movie is loosely based on the Mary Kay Letourneau case: A 36-year-old woman had sex with a 13-year-old boy, went to prison pregnant with his daughter and had the baby, and then after she was released and it was legal, married him.

The movie opens some time into their relationship — their youngest kids are graduating high school, and about to head off to college. Natalie Portman is an actor — well, okay, I guess to be more precise I should say that Natalie Portman’s character is an actor — and she’s going to be playing the part of the woman in a new upcoming movie, and so Portman wants to meet the woman (played by Julianne Moore) to get a sense of her character so she can play her more true-to-life. And as she gets to know the family better, it turns out that their situation is a bit more complicated than the “true love, just too early” story they’ve been telling the world (and themselves).

Although Portman and Moore are the big stars and the movie focuses on them, it’s really about Charles Melton’s Joe, the child abuse victim/husband. Because while Moore’s character is messed up, there’s nothing that novel about people who are messed up in ways that cause them to act delusionally and selfishly and impulsively, with little ability to self-regulate. We understand those people pretty quickly. But Joe seems level-headed and reasonable despite everything, and the question of what he’s thinking seems a lot more complicated.

And this is where the movie is at its best, I think, because the character it portrays is one who actually has believed himself to be in this grand romantic love affair — but so much of his narrative about the relationship came from that predatory older woman when he was a vulnerable and impressionable kid. Now as Portman comes into town (and as he corresponds with an anonymous fellow butterfly enthusiast), he’s starting to rethink the relationship from a more adult perspective, and realizing that maybe this actually isn’t what he wants, and this relationship isn’t good for him and there was something fucked up about it.

Which is obviously true — we can see that she’s manipulative and needy, and we see the way she passive-aggressively puts down her daughters, and clearly he’d be better off without her. But like… rethinking your self-conception and the nature of your relationship is a thing that is difficult for people to work themselves up to. It’s clear this has been a slow burn for him, with Portman’s presence (and particularly a fling they have) acting as a catalyst, but even at the end of the movie, despite a conversation he tries to initiate, they’re still together, so. (In real life, Letourneau’s victim filed for separation after fifteen years of marriage; she died from cancer while they were separated.)

But while that’s the main thread of the movie, another thread is the relationship between Portman and Moore, as the former tries to learn how to become the latter. Director Todd Haynes says that there’s inspiration here from Bergman’s Persona, and you can definitely see that. There is something sinister about the way that Portman insinuates herself into their lives — and to some extent, even having sex with Moore’s husband is kind of a way to become her more thoroughly. Her insincerity throughout the movie isn’t evil exactly, but at the same time, it is clear that she really has nobody’s interests except her own in mind.

I was worried that this was going to be a tawdry retelling of a sensationalist tabloid story, but by setting it late into their marriage, Haynes makes it into something a lot deeper and more complex, and uses this sensationalist backdrop to tell a very human story.