From Jennifer Lawrence’s new movie to Materialists, one song is suddenly everywhere.

When it came time to commission a new pop song for her bittersweet romance Materialists, Celine Song had a simple guideline for prospective songwriters: Make it like John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves,” which Song has called “the most romantic song in the world.” The duet between Prine and the singer Iris DeMent has been turning up in all kinds of mismatched love stories this year, a remarkable resurgence for a revered songwriter who died in 2020. It’s in the headphones of the slouchy Brit played by Will Sharpe the morning after he hooks up with Meg Stalter’s frenzied American on Lena Dunham’s Netflix series Too Much, and it’s the anthem that Jennifer Lawrence’s blocked novelist and Robert Pattinson’s absentee dad use to cement their ill-advised marriage in Lynne Ramsay’s new movie Die My Love. The two even end up singing it to each other later on, a moment that served as a major hook for the movie’s trailers.

The “more upbeat” version Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner came up with for Materialists, “My Baby (Got Nothing at All),” is a snug coda for a movie about love trumping economic precarity. As the credits roll over footage of couples lining up for no-frills marriages at New York’s City Hall, Zauner sings about a man whose devotion to her is more important than his bank balance: “Cold cash comforts are overrated. … Only company baby’s got is mine.” But it’s almost too snug, as if its soaring chords are meant to banish the audience’s lingering doubts without actually resolving them.

The trouble is less with the song itself than with Song’s attempt to pivot toward a conventionally reassuring ending, which feels tacked onto a movie dedicated to the idea that the choice between love and money is never as simple as movies make it out to be. Dakota Johnson’s Lucy is a professional matchmaker whose moneyed clients come to her with long lists of demands in their ideal mate, from annual income to minimum height. But her personal dilemma isn’t entirely a superficial one. Lucy’s longtime boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), is a struggling actor in his mid-30s who still lives with multiple roommates, taking the odd catering gig to pay his meager rent. And, as Lucy hovers around the same age, her job drives home every day that her value as a romantic asset is rapidly running out. If she stays with this lovable loser, she risks losing her chance of marrying a man who could give her the lifelong comfort she desires. Given that financial issues are one of the most frequent sources of marital tension, isn’t her relationship with John doomed either way?

Ultimately, Lucy makes the same decision as just about every other movie heroine. She chooses John, quits her soul-killing job, and, as Zauner’s song pours over the soundtrack, the two join the crowds lining up for their marriage licenses. But by the time they walk off-screen toward a happy if uncertain future, the song has changed, replaced by the one that inspired it. And Prine’s song sends Lucy and John off on a very different note, one more honest and complicated than Materialists is equipped to handle.

Like “My Baby (Got Nothing at All),” “In Spite of Ourselves” is about sticking by the person you love, but while Zauner’s song is aspirational, Prine’s is almost brutally down to earth. Performed with the Arkansas-born folkie Iris DeMent, Prine’s song slots loosely into the tradition of salt-and-pepper duets like Johnny and June Carter Cash’s “Jackson” and George and Tammy Wynette’s “We’re Gonna Hold On,” in which an idealized vision of love collides with its material reality. Prine was never romantically involved with DeMent, but when the song was released in 1999, the 52-year-old had recently married his third wife and survived a bout with neck cancer, and it reflects the weary but triumphant perspective of a man who’s weathered life’s hardships and come out the other side.

While songwriters, like most artists, tend to concern themselves with beginnings and endings, “In Spite of Ourselves” is written from the middle, the place where, if we’re lucky, we spend most of our lives. The couple whose voices Prine and DeMent take on have been together for a while—we don’t know how long, but long enough to get on each other’s nerves, and then get used to it. Prine starts off describing his partner with what sounds like a list of complaints, the kinds of things that might not seem like a big deal to anyone else: the way she sits, the way she likes her eggs. But by the time DeMent picks up the story in the second verse, things have gotten grudgingly, if eccentrically, affectionate. “He ain’t too sharp, but he gets things done,” she sings, “drinks his beer like it’s oxygen.”

These aren’t the starry-eyed impressions of two people who’ve just met. This is a man and a woman who’ve known each other for years, seen each other at their best and at their worst, and concluded that they love them both the same. They know their quirks and their kinks—he knows she gets turned on by movies about criminals, and she once caught him rifling through her dirty underwear—but that knowledge has only strengthened their bond. They haven’t settled, exactly, but they’ve learned, through time and trial, that real, lasting love is imperfect, and embracing those imperfections is what makes it last. When the two singers jump in together on the song’s chorus, it’s not to proclaim their determination to work through the hard times, George and Tammy style. It’s to acknowledge, more than it is to brag, that this actually is as good as love gets. “Against all odds,” they sing, “honey, we’re the big door prize.”

Prine’s gruff twang had been made even rougher by his illness, and DeMent’s keening wail is hardly the stuff of mellifluous harmonies. (That’s her high lonesome sound over the opening credits of The Leftovers’ second season, urging audiences to “Let the Mystery Be.”) But when they join together, a rough-hewn magic takes hold. They aren’t harmonizing, exactly, just singing the same notes an octave apart, and the synchronization isn’t perfect. “Islands in the Stream” this ain’t, and that’s the beauty of it.

By the time Lawrence’s Grace and Pattinson’s Jackson get hitched midway through Die My Love, perfection has been off the table for a while. While Grace is pregnant with their first child, the two move from New York City to the isolation of rural Montana, and after the baby is born, Jackson abandons her for long stretches—purportedly because he’s working at some unspecified job, although the spare condoms he keeps in his truck suggest he’s picking up more than the occasional shift. It’s clear long before a chirpy local mom broaches the topic at a party that Grace is suffering from postpartum depression, aggravated by her partner’s inability to help with the burden of new parenthood—or, indeed, to do anything at all. When she complains about being left along during his frequent road trips, he gets her a dog despite her emphatic protests that she doesn’t want another living thing to take care of. (It turns out he’s the one who wants the dog but also expects her to be responsible for it.)

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Getting married is a last-ditch effort to patch up their relationship—not a beginning, but an attempt to stave off the end. And as they two-step to “In Spite of Ourselves,” it seems like they might just have pulled it off. Everything else fades away as the couple dance in their own private world, whispering to each other as confetti falls and their friends clap in slow motion. But then there’s a harsh cut and suddenly Grace is crawling around on the floor to a chaotic punk song. The moment can’t last.

They get one more chance to get it back. As they’re driving down the road in frozen silence in the wake of yet another fight, Prine’s voice comes over the radio, and Jackson starts singing along. When DeMent’s voice comes along, Grace joins in, too, her voice soft, her eyes wide open. The song doesn’t take over this time; you can hear it and them both, trying to bring it into their world rather than vanish into its. But they’re too flawed, too far apart. Right before he starts to sing, Jackson promises Grace, “I can try harder,” and you can tell he wants to mean it, just as you know he doesn’t, or he can’t. You can’t force the kind of love “In Spite of Ourselves” is about. You have to earn it, one day after another, and they’re out of time.

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