Gloria Grahame was a real person—she won a best supporting actress Oscar in 1952 for The Bad and the Beautiful—but you don’t need to know that to appreciate Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, a dreamy glimpse into the final years of Grahame’s chaotic, beautiful life.
Framed by her lengthy affair with a much younger actor, Peter Turner, and Grahame’s eventual death from cancer, Liverpool is based on Turner’s book of the same name. Most of the plot points are available on Wikipedia, so none of these things are spoilers. But the more salient reason they won’t be surprising is that Liverpool follows a very familiar formulaic trajectory: It’s a classic May-December romance, an old Hollywood tearjerker that’s also a little bit funny.