You & Me and You & Me and You & Me

Jules and Adam Hole are a middle-aged married couple in Brighton, England, whose twenty-five-year marriage has grown stale. Jules runs a struggling catering business called Jules's Kitchen, while Adam works as a narrative game designer at Quark Studios. Their adult children still live at home: twenty-four-year-old Nelly and twenty-one-year-old Liam, who dropped out of university. Jules resents the dated kitchen Adam refuses to renovate because his late father built it. Adam worries about Liam, who lost two fingers on a garden zip line Adam built and now wants to start a band. When Jules insists Adam take old belongings to the dump, including mixtapes and CDs the couple exchanged over the years, he is wounded by her suggestion to re-create them on Spotify.

The couple attends a lavish pool party thrown by Darius Angelopoulos, Adam's best friend since childhood, who has returned to Brighton after building his gaming company, Totally Sirius, into a fifty-million-dollar success in San Francisco. Adam co-developed the original concept but declined to join Darius. At the party, Adam gravitates toward Meredith Peterson, a younger colleague, while Jules confides her frustrations to Darius, who offers to help fund her dream pop-up restaurant. Jules recalls a secret moment eight years earlier when Darius asked her to leave Adam and nearly kissed her. When Darius calls them up for karaoke, Adam refuses, leaving Jules humiliated.

Walking home, their resentments erupt. Jules accuses Adam of never taking risks. Adam retorts that their plan to emigrate to Australia led to his parents' deaths: They were killed in a car crash driving home from the airport, a guilt he has carried for decades. Jules tells Adam she would change everything about their life, then slams the door in his face.

Drunk and alone in the shed, Adam finds the box of mixtapes and plays For Juliet 1989 on his father's old Sony boom box. A bolt of lightning coincides with a whirlwind that pulls him into a vortex. He wakes inside his seventeen-year-old self, experiencing everything the younger Adam does. He sees his parents alive. At the Peregrine Hotel where Young Jules waitresses, he inadvertently imposes himself to insult her then-boyfriend, Mickey Ratty. After sixty minutes, matching the tape's length, the whirlwind pulls him back. A tattoo Jules got in Ratty's honor no longer exists, confirming that changes in the past create new parallel timelines.

Jules dismisses his account as drunken nonsense, but that evening Adam locks her in the shed and begs her to try. She plays Move Your Body! 1993 and lands inside her twenty-one-year-old self at a Brighton nightclub, reliving the night she and Adam first kissed. She imposes herself and tells Adam she dislikes beards. Upon returning, Adam has been clean-shaven his entire adult life. He explains that each change spawns an alternate universe rather than creating a paradox. They find Nelly and Liam unchanged and make a pact: change nothing, create no new timelines, and always disclose if anything appears different.

They begin traveling regularly, and each trip rekindles intimacy they had lost. They discover that new recordings also work as time-travel devices, sending the listener to the day each was exchanged for the recording's duration. Soon, however, both secretly break their pact. Jules scrawls the name of a winning horse on the kitchen calendar during a brief trip; her new-timeline self bets on it and wins nearly twenty thousand pounds, paying off a secret credit card debt. Adam travels to a 2009 family holiday and sends his younger self a motivational note that transforms his body over the following years. He returns to find an athletic physique and a flirtatious rapport with Meredith as his beach volleyball partner.

Jules secretly travels to 2012 and enrolls her younger self in a French cooking course. She returns fluent in French with a renovated kitchen, but discovers Nelly is more distant on this timeline, their relationship damaged by Jules's years of absence while studying. Jules cooks a triumphant dinner for Darius's investors, and he offers to fund her restaurant. Driving her home, Darius nearly kisses her. She pulls away, but Adam witnesses the moment, and the couple argues bitterly.

Adam makes his most consequential change by traveling to 2014 and destroying the garden zip line, preventing the accident that cost Liam his fingers. In this new timeline, Liam pursues music unimpeded, becoming a rising star touring Japan with his band, Grass Stain. Adam also sells preserved childhood Star Wars figurines to buy Jules her dream car and fund her restaurant, and he ends his flirtation with Meredith after she tries to kiss him.

Their deceptions unravel when Jules catches Adam using the machine after he is fired from Quark, which Darius recently purchased. Both confess. Jules is furious that Adam altered Liam's life without her knowledge and loads the remaining tapes onto the barbecue. Adam reveals he also traveled back and signed the Totally Sirius contract, creating a timeline where Jules left him for Darius; he then used another tape to undo the signing. Liam's bandmate Max calls from Japan to report that Liam has overdosed. Jules screams that Adam's fix caused this, orders him to leave, and sets fire to the tapes.

Desperate, Jules rescues one surviving CD and plays it, landing in 2016, where she deliberately kisses Darius. This creates a timeline in which she leaves Adam, moves to San Francisco, and has a daughter named Phoebe with Darius. She wakes years later in Darius's mansion, overwhelmed by love for Phoebe but drowning in regret: Nelly barely speaks to her, Liam refuses contact entirely, and Adam has moved on with Meredith. Jules drives to her old house, where Adam retrieves the Sony and a single forgotten tape. After a wrenching goodbye to Phoebe, Jules plays the tape and lands inside her seventeen-year-old self at the Peregrine in 1989.

Jules types two sheets of instructions, seals them in an envelope addressed to her and Adam's future selves, and posts it at the neighboring solicitors' office with delivery instructions for decades hence. When Young Adam offers her the mixtape he has made, Jules imposes herself one final time and tells him she is not sure about mixtapes. Without the tradition of exchanging recordings ever taking root, there will be no box of tapes, no time machine, and no possibility of altering the past. Jules feels herself fading as this timeline ceases to exist, accepting that the young couple must build their imperfect life on their own.

On the resulting timeline, Adam never discovers the machine. The morning after he is fired from Quark, months after Darius's party, Jules receives a mysterious envelope hand-delivered by Eddy, the solicitor from the office next to the Peregrine. One sheet advises Adam to pursue a gaming livestream called the Dadass Dudes with his friend Doodles, and Jules to open a restaurant called Chez Jules at the Peregrine. The other reads "BE HONEST. BE KIND." Adam confesses he has thought about Meredith, and Jules confesses Darius tried to kiss her. When Darius arrives, the whole family confronts him and sends him away. Adam and Doodles convert the shed into a streaming studio, Jules opens her restaurant, Nelly plans to travel through Central and South America, and Liam's band secures a support slot on a reunion tour. On their twenty-fifth anniversary, after slow-dancing on the beach where they first kissed, Adam and Jules walk home and settle onto their shabby sofa, content in the imperfect, unaltered life they have built together.