Grammar Fans Flock to a Film About Participles and Gerunds

Jennifer Griffin stood outside a movie theater on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, waving to a friend.

“I’m here with all the other dorks!” she called out, using a prepositional phrase to get the attention of Lisa Kuklinski. Soon, they were joined by Miranda Schwartz, a copy editor who was wearing a shirt that read “I’M SILENTLY CORRECTING YOUR GRAMMAR” — notably, the message lacked a punctuation mark at the end.

The women are members of a group chat in which they text each other about the words they find in the New York Times Spelling Bee game. This was their girls’ night out. “When you find someone as nerdy as you are about the Oxford comma,” said Ms. Kuklinski, an actuary, “you find you have plenty of other things in common.”

They were attending the first New York screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a new documentary about a woman who set up a “grammar table” in all 50 states for passers-by to stop and ask her about punctuation and past participles.

The film’s star, Ellen Jovin, schleps her table from Maine to Hawaii and each state in between, dispensing lessons that are precise but not pedantic, engaging in the sort of face-to-face conversations with strangers that are so absent from quotidian contemporary life.

At the screening this week, more than 450 grammar aficionados (the median age hovered in the early-AARP-membership range) came to celebrate “Rebel With a Clause,” which was directed by Ms. Jovin’s husband, Brandt Johnson.

Before and after the screening, filmgoers bantered about whether to place a comma after the penultimate item in a list, discussed the appropriate usage of “lie” and “lay” and united in a shared reverence for language, ideas and the grammatical rules designed to give clarity to free expression.

Ms. Jovin greeted the audience members and directed them to stacks of worksheets with the “Nonmandatory Grammar Quiz” she had created. (Sample question: “What is the square root of the number of letters in the part of speech that ‘punctiliousness’ is?”)

She was wearing a shirt with rhinestones that spelled out “Grammar Is Groovy,” which she had ordered online at the last minute. “All of my other grammar clothes are not dressy enough,” she said.

A writer and writing instructor who has studied about 25 languages, Ms. Jovin first set out her grammar table on the streets of New York in 2018. Since then, she has written a book, also called “Rebel With a Clause,” which was published in 2022.

Mr. Johnson, a 6-foot-6 former pro basketball player and communication skills consultant, loomed amid the crowd. He said that as he witnessed the “humor and humanity” at the grammar table, he was moved to capture it on film. “I saw the fun and the connections,” he said. “It felt like just a beautiful thing that I wanted to share with the world.”

The theater filled up with strangers and friends. Lloyd Rotker and his wife, Judith, had once seen Ms. Jovin speak at a library. “I’m very concerned about grammar,” Mr. Rotker said. “As we lose interest and skills in grammar, we lose clarity in language and eventually in thought.”

Ms. Rotker said she was not as grammatically attuned as her husband, but that he did not often correct her. “That’s why we’re still married,” he said. She nodded. (Their 51st anniversary is later this month.)

Sitting near the front of the theater were Janice and Korey Klostermeier, former neighbors of Ms. Jovin and Mr. Johnson. They had flown in from Miami Beach.

“I love good ol’ grammar,” said Ms. Klostermeier, who quickly added, “That’s O-L-apostrophe.”

The joy among the grammar lovers was occasionally tempered by worry over word choice.

“Can I sneak by?” Taylor Mali, a poet, asked the people sitting on an aisle as he slid past them toward a seat in the center of their row.

“You may,” one of them answered.

Mr. Mali sighed as he recounted the exchange. “Of all the places,” he said, his head hung low.

The movie opens with an animated discussion in Decatur, Ala., between Ms. Jovin and two men who may or may not have spent a few hours in a bar before sidling up to her grammar table. They wanted her to weigh in on the proper placement of the apostrophe in “y’all.”

The film then takes viewers on Ms. Jovin’s road trip to Detroit; Salt Lake City; Little Rock, Ark.; and beyond. She and Mr. Johnson set up a table covered with dictionaries and usage manuals, and wait for questions.

The action is breezy and lighthearted. At several moments, the audience burst into laughter. When Ms. Jovin professed her love for diagraming sentences, the crowd erupted in applause.

The film also offers instances of surprise, even for some who consider themselves grammatically sharp. On several occasions, Ms. Jovin clarifies a misconception about ending a sentence with a preposition.

To do so is actually perfectly correct, Ms. Jovin explains. “It is a grammatical myth that made its way into English via Latin, but English is a Germanic language,” she tells one table visitor who responds with a delighted “Shut up!”

Audience members filtered into the lobby afterward, checking for news on their phones. While they were watching a film centered on language and civil discussion, President Trump was delivering a sometimes inflaming speech to Congress, during which he faced politicians protesting silently with signs, others groaning and booing, and a heckler, Representative Al Green, who was tossed out.

The timeliness of the film’s message was not lost on Kathryn Szoka, who co-owns Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

“She is talking to people, including many who probably have very different views from her own,” Ms. Szoka said of Ms. Jovin. “These are respectful and engaging conversations around our shared values and serve as an illustration of how art and language bring us together.”