Among their topics is the sentence that gives the movie its title and that Mr. Chomsky has used, by moving one word, to argue that the linguistic information children receive is insufficient to explain how they acquire the grammar of language. “It seems plain,” Mr. Chomsky has written, “that language acquisition is based on the child’s discovery of what, from a formal point of view, is a deep and abstract theory — a generative grammar of his language — many of the concepts and principles of which are only remotely related to experience by long and intricate chains of unconscious quasi-inferential steps.”

When Mr. Chomsky diagrams the title sentence with a marker to reveal its grammatical structure, Mr. Gondry makes those words come richly, cogently, to life.