screenplay

Lucky for us, that means there’s plenty of time to behold Lawrence’s ravenous, remarkable performance before “Die My Love” is consumed in the flames sparked by the friction between its screenplay and star.

One of the pleasures here is witnessing both actors reanimate the rhythms of a long-ago conversation, their text absent the typical tidiness of a screenplay and instead an interwoven network of inflection, attitude, allusion.

Unlike other filmmaking duos, where the credits don’t quite reflect a complex fusion of responsibilities behind the camera, Bentley and Kwedar write screenplays together for just one of them to direct, on an alternating basis.

But for the right friend — and it’s likely that, in Los Angeles, you have a friend with an unpublished novel or screenplay — this gift could be a game-changer.

Zemeckis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bob Gale, must have been as much of a madman savant as Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown to compress so much plot into every frame.