Ben Aldridge, left, and Jim Parsons in Spoiler Alert (Linda Källérus/Focus Features)

Writer/director Michael Showalter has made a career of earnest, small scale, against-the-grain romances and comedies. His latest is adapted from a memoir by TV journalist Michael Ausiello. Its subject matter—a relationship where one partner becomes terminally ill—is akin to Showalter’s The Big Sick, but here, he branches out with more ambitious material.

Spoiler Alert is cognizant of its place in media culture: It’s a romcom weepie that knows it’s a romcom weepie, and even references famed tearjerkers like Terms of Endearment and Beaches. Sally Field starred in the titular role in Showalter’s light and amusing Hello, My Name Is Doris, and her casting here is an instant reminder of her grieving mother turn in Steel Magnolias. Because the movie is often so self-referential, with its quivery, on-the-nose narration from Jim Parsons’s Michael, the emotional power is sometimes lessened.

The film begins in the early 2000s with well-mined pop culture markers. It’s the twilight years before smart phones (and their dating apps) and the legalization of gay marriage. It’s fitting that Michael and Kit (Ben Aldridge) would meet in a dance club backed by Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” The seemingly innocuous tune in retrospect becomes a haunted theme for the self-described “hopeless romantic” Michael’s bruised remembrance.

Kit is brawny and hunky, and Michael is puny and rail thin, a professed “former fat kid” who only seems to consume Diet Coke, but opposites attract. As Kit’s friend (Nikki M. James) notes, Kit is into “tall dweebs.” It’s a charming meet-cute, with a following funny scene where Kit first sees Michael’s apartment that houses an unusually (and frighteningly) large collection of Smurf paraphernalia. Michael’s obsession with television harkens back to his difficult childhood, when he lost both parents at a young age.

In a risky gesture that doesn’t always work, Showalter intercuts late 1980s laugh-tracked sitcom re-creations throughout (interestingly, Jordan Peele’s Nope also deployed sitcom scenes, though with a stronger sense of tonal dissonance and dark showbiz symbolism). Sometimes the most intense moments are interrupted for fantastical television dream sequences or real shows, including clips from the glittery RuPaul’s Drag Race, as if Michael wants to change the channel on the pain and grit of his own life.

As we watch the relationship deepen, Kit comes out to his kooky parents (Field and the amusing Bill Irwin), who become closer to Michael in turn. Then, in a “time jump”—often used on television—the story skirts over several years of their relationship to a more embittered state. The couple have moved into an enviable large Manhattan apartment (with outdoor space!), but have grown passionless, sexless, and combative. They care about each other, but resent one another, as their therapist also surmises. But this frayed bond is strengthened and renewed again once Kit suddenly falls ill.

In Showalter’s Hello, My Name Is Doris and The Eyes of Tammy Faye, hammy—if intensely watchable—performances and characters take up a lot of room. The acting in Spoiler Alert is thankfully more naturalistic, even as the film produces self-consciously garish swings in trying to bury its potential mawkishness. An obvious Terms of Endearment joke doesn’t land and only serves as a reminder of how much more devastating that film is, with its continuously seamless blending of humor and tragedy, as well as its patience in following a relationship over a span of years, without skipping too far ahead of itself.

The best parts of Spoiler Alert are actually the potentially mawkish ones, where the central relationship and its sudden tragic swerve are tender and moving. The actors do good work, in particular Field and Aldridge. There’s something mysterious about Kit. A corporate photographer by day, we aren’t always sure of what he’s up to and what he’s really thinking (the story is from Michael’s point of view, after all)—and there’s even the suspicion of an affair. Here, Aldridge’s Kit feels like a wholly real person with vulnerabilities and secrets, which makes his fate even more wrenching to behold.