It feels as though it’s been well over a decade since two overqualified movie stars of Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh’s caliber have teamed up to elevate an otherwise unremarkable weepy through the sheer power of their electric chemistry, but that is precisely what Brooklyn filmmaker John Crowley has delivered with We Live in Time — a throwback romantic drama from the Hollywood playbook of yesteryear with an anachronistic gimmick that’s just artsy enough to be acquired and distributed stateside by indie powerhouse A24.

Tobias (Garfield) is a middle manager at Weetabix — a UK breakfast cereal, for stateside readers who might be as unfamiliar with the brand as I was when watching the film. His lack of a working pen to sign his divorce papers compels him to take a walk to a nearby corner store in nothing but his hotel robe. Chasing one of his newly purchased pens into the middle of the street after his nervous energy sends his writing utensils scattering, Tobias is run over by Almut (Pugh), a Michelin-star-winning chef preparing to open her first restaurant. But audiences don’t see the pair’s painfully adorable meet-cute until well into the film, as Nick Payne’s screenplay scrambles the events of the couple’s shared life as efficiently as Almut scrambles eggs when teaching Tobias how to perfectly prepare the breakfast staple.

Instead, we meet Almut and Tobias at the peak of their idyllic shared life and pinball through the highs and lows of their relationship. This creative decision will undoubtedly turn off viewers who aren’t primed to pay attention to the length of Florence Pugh’s bangs as the key indicator of when a scene is taking place. A pair of elderly couples I sat next to in the theater — who seemed to have missed the memo on basic theater etiquette during their extended time on this planet, I might add — were audibly flummoxed by the film’s continuous tonal whiplashes.

One moment, Almut and Tobias are fighting about the former’s lack of desire to have children; the next, they are attempting to break the news of Almut’s cancer resurgence to their young daughter. Almut’s stage three ovarian cancer provides the dramatic pulse for We Live in Time, as she must decide whether to prolong her time through the grueling process of treating cancer or maximize the time she has left — which, to her, means competing in the physically taxing and time-consuming world chef competition, the Bocuse d’Or.

I lost one of my closest childhood friends to cancer; he contracted neuroblastoma at just five years old and fought for three tireless years before the disease took him from me. Anyone intimately familiar with the harrowing process of chemotherapy will instantly empathize with Almut’s struggle, but her decisions may come off as shockingly selfish to the uninitiated. Crowley’s comfort with making Almut a potentially unlikable character to a large swath of the audience is commendable, even if you do get the sense that all the characters' problems would be solved with a simple conversation that they refuse to have for the sake of dramatic tension.

We Live in Time is an easy film to pick apart for those inclined to do so; Garfield has little to do beyond handsomely crying, his career proving to be of little consequence in a film that’s even less interested in the world of corporate cereal than its audience. The film’s non-linear structure gives the impression that this is a love story being remembered rather than experienced, despite the movie settling into a decidedly linear sequence in its second half. There’s even a compelling argument to be made that organizing We Live in Time’s scenes in sequential order would actually heighten its emotional impact.

None of that matters in the face of Garfield and Pugh’s effortlessly palpable chemistry. Without its two stars, We Live in Time would be the type of forgettable adult drama unceremoniously dumped on streaming without the hope of finding an audience. Instead, the film is being successfully platformed by A24 in a year that’s seen the studio completely bungle the release of what was once considered an Oscar frontrunner, Sing Sing — a film I still haven’t had the chance to see in my area. But what are movie stars for if not to elevate what’s on the page with sheer charm and charisma?

It has been a recurring theme in the film fan community to bemoan the current state of Hollywood, which casts its stars in thankless roles in sexless movies; their faces hidden behind masks, their actions shrouded in murky CGI, their performances largely delivered in an ADR booth while a stunt double does the heavy lifting. In that sense, is We Live in Time not the film we’ve all been asking for? We Live in Time is a drama made decidedly for adults; it is not afraid to acknowledge sex or its logistics, and not only allows movie stars to be movie stars, but practically demands it. Sometimes, when a movie is released is just as important as what a movie is, and in a market that produces almost exclusively self-serious slop, a solid, old-fashioned, manipulative weepy arrives right on time.