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Grammar Fans Flock to a Film About Participles and Gerunds

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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 on the shirt 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.