“We Live in Time” is an old-fashioned weeper, a “Love Story” with a British accent with a “meet cute” and falling hard and Big Dreams and tragedy just around the corner.

But director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Payne tell this ever-so-conventional tale out of order, jumping from meeting with an oncologist to backo that first date to rearing a little girl on a farm to shaving the wife’s head to “remission” to a chef’s grasp at the big prize at “the culinary Olympics.”

And all due respect to Crowley — whose “Intermission,” “The Goldfinch,” “Boy A” and “Brooklyn” challenged and engrossed and were sometimes gimmicky yet all terrific showcases for their stars — but that time-shifting tends to pull his latest picture’s punches.

A sad moment here and a potentially wrenching one there all feel muted as the drama doesn’t build towards a catharsis for the viewer.

Stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh have chemistry as a couple, and barely a natural moment as “parents,” never quite shaking “They’re play-acting this” in those scenes.

And the narrative’s turn towards a Big Finish is so conventional that it trivializes what’s come before.

Garfield plays an ever-traveling marketer for a Brit breakfast cereal who meets Ms. Right by accident. She runs him over in her Mini Cooper (so he survives) on a night when he has stumbled out of his latest hotel room — in his robe — in search of a convenience store that sells pens.

He needs to sign his divorce papers. And when Tobias awakens to Almut’s presence in a hospital corridor, there’s no messiness about doctors, possible police charges, etc. Just lots of eye contact with the lovely chef who’s just put him in a neck brace.

So OK, maybe OPENING with that “meet cute” would have been a bit much. Better to tuck the cute-falling-into-cutesie into a flashback.

The story of their romance will let her discover he’s not “married,” after all, when he shows up at her restaurant for her make-up-for-that-little-accident free meal she offers plays-out after we’ve heard a doctor tell them the tumor she has is “too big” to operate on, that there’s been a “reoccurrence.”

“I’m not sure I know how to go through all that again,” the Anglo-Bavarian chef Almut tells Wheatabix seller Tobias when facing a year of chemo, surgery and the all that entails.

The idea is that we know they’ve got a little girl, and “We Live in Time” will show us what they went through to make that decision and the uncertain future that awaits every choice they and we make in life.

“We live in time, ” the Julian Barnes (“The Sense of an Ending”) quote goes. “It holds us and molds us.” And we never know how things will work out at the moment we make every fateful decision.

The film’s disordered structure hides clunkier moments in between winning ones. And while it isn’t hard to follow, the fact that it’s a puzzle we’re putting together as the film serves-up piece-by-piece undercuts the chemistry and the emotional build-up, and can’t disguise the cloying.

Random bits of his doting architect dad (Reginald Hodge) cutting his 30something son’s hair — kind of an emotional upending of the “emotionally unavailable Brit” stereotype — or the idea that “Anglo-Bavarian cuisine” (another stereotype steamrolled) isn’t a punchline get lost in the literal — and gimmicky — shuffle.

But Pugh shimmers and Garfield gushes and blushes and even if they both overdo that parenting pose. Grace Delaney plays their adorable little girl, deployed sparingly.

Such movies are manipulative by nature and we embrace them for that. Here, that’s more obvious and heavy-handed, and the manipulation tends to spare us tears — and laughs — when the tears are entirely the point.

Rating: R, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh and Grace Delaney

Credits: Directed by John Crowley, scripted by Nick Payne. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:48