As May December has made the rounds at this year’s film festivals, comparisons have been made between the Netflix movie and the real-life story of Mary Kay Letourneau.

The above teacher began a sexual relationship with 12-year-old student Vili Fualaau, going to jail in 1997 before the two were eventually married for 14 years and had several children.

Director Haynes and star Moore mark their fifth collaboration with this unsettling melodrama about an actress (Natalie Portman) who embarks on a research trip to prepare to play an infamous woman (Moore) who shocked her close-knit community when she was revealed to have sexually abused a seventh-grade boy.

Moore plays Gracie, a 30-something woman who begins a relationship with Joe (played by Charles Melton) when he is in seventh grade.

Twenty years later, the two are married and have three kids headed to college. Things change when actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) shows up at their home for research in order to prepare to play Gracie in a new movie.

Director Haynes added that at the beginning he kept away from the real story, “but then there were times when it became very, very helpful to get very specific about the research and we learned things from that relationship, even in the ways that it differed from the relationship between Gracie and Joe in our film.”

Moore echoed that “this is not the story of Mary Kay Letourneau.”  In playing the role, Moore was drawn to “Gracie’s hyper-femininity, the fact that she was so interested in gender and the way that she felt she was almost a child; that she was the one that hadn’t been in charge of the start of this relationship, and it stands in direct contrast with the transgression that happened 20 years earlier.”

Portman noted that she was won over by the script, in how the “characters were just so wild and strong and complicated.”

Despite sharing the screen with two Oscar winners, Melton is receiving particular acclaim for his performance, as Portman’s character’s arrival shakes up Joe’s marriage and forces him to look back at how it began.

Indeed, the revelation here is Melton, who holds up his own, delivering an impressive supporting turn as the anti-hero (victim for some), a man who’s now in his late 30s and father to three of the perpetrator’s children.

Melton had gained 40 pounds for the role by “eating a lot of hamburgers and pizza” to represent what the character was going through.

Haynes said that since the real story happened 20 years before the film is set, a big focus of the film is the tabloid culture coverage of the couple’s marriage: “It’s about the way that we look at ourselves as stories are told and we navigate and question our expectations and moral positions that we bring to the stories we watch.”

Actor Will Ferrell, the film’s producer alongside partner Jessica Elbaum, added, “There’s been so much time and distance from when the real story actually happened that it really ends up being a story about desperate, unhappy people and how one decision of narcissism affects so many other people and changes their lives forever.”

May December is in select theaters and starts streaming on Netflix December 1.