“What’s the opposite of a fiancée?” Scarlett Johansson’s Nicole muses, trying to find the right word to describe her soon-to-be ex-husband Charlie (Adam Driver). She doesn’t really want to still call him her husband, because that ship has clearly sailed. But nor is he an ex yet either. There’s a lack of finality to their relationship. Unsigned paperwork. Unfought legal battles. Unclaimed wreckage from what was once a marriage.

In a sense, it seems naive to not have a name for this limbo period of a dying relationship. After all, a staggering 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. For those who aren’t great at math, that’s one in (*checks calculator*) two. Perhaps the opposite of a fiancée should be a word with a similarly Francophilic mouthfeel as fiancée. Philocée maybe (derived from the Greek root Philia, referring to “Platonic” love) or mortée (referencing the French word for “death”). Both sound dignified and yet almost like a curse word. Perfect for chucking in your anti-fiancée’s smug face. Maybe fuckstick just works best. Seems to be pretty self-explanatory and works great as a mud-chucker of a term.

Marriage Story, partially inspired by writer and director Noah Baumbach’s 2010 separation from then-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, describes this painful process in traumatizing detail. Though Nicole and Charlie have decided its best to part ways romantically, they want to do so with as little bloodshed as possible. For the benefit of their son and what they hope to be sustainable positive rapport. Shared Christmases. Celebratory dinners that don’t end in tears. They want to kill the marriage to save the family.

It seems only suiting that three-time divorceé John Steinbeck wrote the passage about best laid plans going asunder. So too goes Nicole and Charlie’s hope for a pleasant divorce, with Marriage Story painfully signaling how even the best-intended “dissolution of romance” ends with claws fully extended, mascara running, drywall punched out. Truly awful names are yelled out in the heat of passion, sure to ring like ugly echoes in both their minds indefinitely.

The myth of the truly amicable divorce remains a nut that Charlie and Nicole cannot crack. There’s a sense of sad inevitability when both parties initially agree to separate amicably, when they consent to figuring out the details outside a lawyer’s office, when shared custody is an assumption and not a battle. But all that goes out the window when lawyers get involved, Laura Dern’s reassuring but vicious Nora entering the mix like a wolf in a spendy pantsuit.

As each side muscles up, tension rises and Marriage Story turns from a somber funeral of what-was-once-love into a hard-to-watch tempest of raw ugly emotion. The many unpleasantries in Marriage Story are provided in part by the knock-down, bang-up blood-match that is the American custodial championship with Baumbach taking precise aim at how divorce lawyers seek to tear families down to the studs, often against their wishes. The mantra shifts: Kill the family, pillage the corpse.

Anyone who has been in a relationship that ended in unkempt fashion or who have seen their parents go through something similar will likely find Marriage Story pretty triggering. Baumbach’s movie can be extremely difficult to watch, often because of the unbridled cruelty of the ex-lovers once the gloves come off, and their pain will translate easily to the audience’s pain. One turbulent and increasingly awful screaming match in particular left more than one of my fellow audience-members noticeably gasping for breathe. A film determined to get its point across, Marriage Story doesn’t cut away from its characters nasty sides, featuring some Nicole-Charlie tête-à-têtes that chewed through my heartstrings like a ravenous sewer creature, leaving me a wide-eyed sniffling mess. Painful realities at the movie’s core hung heavy over me a good while after the movie reached its bittersweet conclusion, haunting my day like the scariest of horror films.

Credit to Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson both, each of whom offers some of the most emotionally raw work of their career. Both of their inevitable award’s highlight reels have plenty of powerful and painful options to choose from and that’s not always the case for performance that can also be as understated and restrained in moments as these are. But their performances are built on the back of Baumbach’s vital script, one which speaks to the intentionally exacerbated trauma of an already emotionally-devastating process.

Baumbach has been writing some of the year’s best scripts for years and Marriage Story only further solidifies his voice as an essential American storyteller. His channeling of his own pain into something that can be universally felt is an exercise in empathy and reflection with Baumbach’s twelfth feature dealing in the particulars of a Hollywood romance in such a way that doesn’t feel distance and unknowable. The specifics of a MacArthur Grant Fellow struggling to direct his Broadway play from afar while his starlet wife is off shooting pilot season does not feel unreadable because of the painfully relatable cornerstones of their broken relationship. Nicole and Charlie or Noah and Jennifer might not be us but we’ve felt similar romantic traumas at some point or another and this is where Marriage Story separates itself from the pack and becomes indispensable: there is no way to ignore its pain.

Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” describes a similarly unmatched relationship, one wherein an unnamed male lover asserts his will and dominion over a girl. In Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino skillfully repurposed the song into a ballad of vengeance, turning the dependent bride into a powerful source of violence. Marriage Story weaves its own spin on this tale-as-told-as-time, one of a powerful man and his penitent bride, asking not what if the woman was left to mourn, or felt the need to seek bloody revenge, but rather, to take the steering wheel. To assert control. To take her life back. Nevertheless, the emotional carnage is still as gory as Tarantino’s bloodiest flick.

CONCLUSION: As real and unblinking a tale of American divorce as there has ever been, ’Marriage Story’ earns career best performances from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson who brilliantly wield Noah Baumbach’s powerful script to punch-drunk results.