"Rebel With A Clause"

According to the publicity page:

One fall day in 2018, Ellen Jovin set up a folding table on a Manhattan sidewalk with a sign that said “Grammar Table.” Right away, passersby began excitedly asking questions, telling stories, and filing complaints.

What happened next is the stuff of grammar legend.

Ellen and her filmmaker husband, Brandt Johnson, took the table on the road, visiting all 50 US states as Brandt shot the grammar action.

The grammar-table journey continued, with a book published in 2022, and now a movie, whose premiere will be at the Planet Word museum on 1/10/2025. You can sign up to learn about other screenings, and here's the trailer.

Ellen Jovin has other accomplishments. A New Yorker article that appeared before the "Grammar Table" was first set up ("The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages", 8/27/2018) mentions her in one of her other roles:

Ellen Jovin, a dynamic New Yorker who has been described as the “den mother” of the polyglot community, explained that her own avid study of languages—twenty-five, to date—“is almost an apology for the dominance of English. Polyglottery is an antithesis to linguistic chauvinism.”

The memetic source of the title is the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, about which Wikipedia says:

Focusing on emotionally confused suburban, middle-class teenagers, the film offers both social commentary and an alternative to previous films depicting delinquents in urban slum environments.

The 1955 movie took its title (though not much else) from a 1944 book by Robert Lindner (Rebel without a cause: The hypnoanalysis of a criminal psychopath), which offers a detailed case study of a man identified as a "criminal psychopath". Lindner says that

the psychopath, like Johnstone's rogue-elephant, is a rebel, a religious dis-obeyer of prevailing codes and standards. Moreover, clinical experience with such individuals makes it appear that the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone.

His memorable phrase aside, the film's characters are not well described by Lindner's sketch, in that most of the film's drama arises from its characters' determination to help their friends and acquaintances deal with difficult circumstances, not their attempts to achieve immediate self-gratification.

As for why Ellen Jovin chose a title echoing the Rebel meme, this passage from her book suggests a possible source, as an analogy between teen/parent relationships and everyone's relationships to self-appointed language authorities:

Sometimes my interventions soothe the insecurities of the questioner. A tiny Filipino woman—maybe five feet tall, about forty years old—approached the table holding the hand of a tinier girl. She wanted to know how to pronounce “finance.” Did the word start out like “fine” and have the stress on the first syllable, or did it begin like “fin” and have the stress on the second? When she heard that her second-syllable stress was fine, even preferable in the opinion of one of the experts whose books lay on the Grammar Table, she started jumping up and down. This is neither hyperbole nor metaphor: she literally jumped up and down and made her smaller companion’s arm sail in sync with her excitement. Someone had been telling her she was wrong, and now she knew she wasn’t, and she felt better! […]

Language is connected to people’s sense of self and their sense of power. There is a lot of grammar insecurity; people regularly wish they knew more about the building blocks of the words they use. Whoever the Grammar Table visitors are, I want them to feel good about the relationship they have with language today and, if they want to acquire new knowledge, hopeful about where they might end up.