It Ends With Us has been all over the news since its release earlier this month, and not for good reasons. Director and lead actor Justin Baldoni reportedly had a much different vision for the film than lead diva Blake Lively, who enlisted her A-lister husband to rewrite an early scene of the film, unbeknownst to Baldoni and the screenwriter.

Lively has also come under fire for minimizing the seriousness of domestic violence, a crucial element of the story, during her press tour. "Grab your friends, wear your florals, and head out to see it," she said of the movie that features a woman getting pushed down the stairs by her husband.

All of this real-life human drama is, sad to say, much more fascinating than the film itself. And so is the story that inspired the bestselling novel on which the film is based. Pop lit author Colleen Hoover, who has sold over 20 million books, said It Ends With Us is based on her own mother.

"As hard as it was back then, there were no resources for women to leave situations like that, but she was able to get out of that relationship, and from then on, I just remember growing up with a mother who was so strong and independent," Hoover said in an interview last year. "I would ask her all the time, 'How did you find yourself in this situation?' And I decided to write a book about it inspired by her courage to leave my biological father."

Hoover was 2 when her mother left her father, saving Hoover from the trauma of growing up in an abusive household. That's a powerful story. It just turns out the fiction isn't very good.

In It Ends with Us, Hoover's overt sentimentality is visible from the get-go as she dares to answer the question, "Is nominative determinism real?" by creating a character named Lily Blossom Bloom who opens a flower shop. Really. The film's self-aware nods to the silliness don't make it any better.

Lily grows up in a small town in Maine with her mother and abusive father. In high school, she befriends a homeless student who has been kicked out of his house for attempting to save his mother from her own domestic abuse situation. The two fall in love but part ways as he goes into the military, and Lily flits about until she opens a flower shop in her mid-30s.

In the book, Lily is 23 and fresh out of college when she opens the shop, and her paramour, Ryle, is an impossibly young 30-year-old neurosurgeon. It is this plot hole that causes the film's timeline to shift some 10 years into the future, and it's also the reason its dialogue falls so flat.

Unfortunately for Ryan Reynolds's screenwriting career, the scene Lively's husband reportedly helped craft is actually the film's most absurd. When Lily first meets Ryle on a rooftop, she starts soliloquizing about maraschino cherries after he asks her to leave the roof's edge "pretty please with a cherry on top." Not exactly the witty banter of full-grown adults. Lily also proclaims to him, "I am an unreliable narrator," ham-handedly setting up Baldoni's vision for the rest of the film.

And while the narrative is creatively framed -- we see the abuse through Lily's eyes, where at first it seems to be an accident but later the truth becomes clear -- the film doesn't seem to think its viewers are deserving of a fully fleshed-out story when a soundtrack featuring Taylor Swift and a cautionary tale about domestic violence will do.

"If a Lily Bloom in real life can sit in this theater and make a different choice for herself than the one that was made for her, maybe she sees herself on that screen and chooses something different for herself," Baldoni said of the film in a press interview.

Lively, however, has tried to take the spotlight off the matter of domestic violence and put it on her character: "The movie covers domestic violence, but what's important about this film is that she is not just a survivor, and she's not just a victim, and while those are huge things to be, they're not her identity."

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Baldoni's sentiment is noble, and there's nothing wrong with Lively's perspective. Stories are no good when they're about "themes" and "issues" rather than people. But on screen, Lively isn't holding up her end of the bargain. Her dialogue and performance are stilted, her clothes are distracting, and we see too little development of her character to justify her sudden shift away from her abusive relationship and toward her first love.

Baldoni, the movie's director, wanted to make a film about domestic violence. Lively, its proxy director, wanted to make a film about the character Lily Bloom. To accomplish both of these goals, It Ends With Us would have to dispense with its corniness and give depth to its characters. What we're left with instead is a film that demands to be taken seriously without working to earn our attention.