The first time I encountered Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, I was home from film school for the summer, trying to refine my taste and figure out what I was “into”. One afternoon, I pressed play on Jerry Maguire, thinking I’d while away some lazy hours with a silly Hollywood picture. But the movie was a jolt to my numbed senses. It was obvious: Jerry Maguire was what I was into. It was a thrilling epiphany, if also a little disappointing. I wanted to be sophisticated, and yet the truth was that I liked … schmaltzy romcoms.

Even as my taste matured and expanded, I kept returning to Jerry Maguire. Its feelgood nature is baked into the premise: Jerry (an electrifying Tom Cruise) is an indefatigable sports agent who overcomes both personal and professional challenges in the path to fulfillment. But the real reason why it makes you feel good is that Jerry’s arduous path transforms him. He doesn’t fall in love with Renee Zellweger’s Dorothy Boyd until they’ve already married and separated; there is no honeymoon-phase montage. The film’s romcom reputation can probably be attributed to its emotional climax: Jerry’s tear-jerking, glorious win-her-back speech, which introduced the phrases “you complete me” and “you had me at hello” to the cultural lexicon. In a traditional romcom, in which marriage is often the coveted conclusion, this moment would precede the wedding.

In fact, Jerry Maguire’s narrative structure recalls the 1930s comedies of remarriage examined by the philosopher Stanley Cavell in his 1981 study Pursuits of Happiness, in that “the drive of its plot is not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together.” Unlike a modern romcom, which usually starts with two people falling in love, Jerry Maguire ends with Jerry – already married to his love interest – falling in love in earnest.

For Jerry, love is tied up with notions of loyalty and service: he earns his clients’ love by serving them, and expects loyalty in return. That equation gets knocked off balance at the beginning of the film, when Jerry gets fired from his agency and only one of his clients, the mercurial wide receiver Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr), follows him into his new venture. Similarly, Dorothy is the only one of Jerry’s co-workers to believe in his vision of a more humane agency characterized by “less players and less money”.

It’s in this context that Dorothy and Jerry fall in love – or rather, Dorothy falls in love with Jerry, and he falls in love with the fact that she is loyal to him. But as Rod advises Jerry, that’s hardly a reason to marry someone. Rod’s loving marriage to Marcee (Regina King) alerts Jerry to what he doesn’t have, which is devotion without expectation. Marcee is a fierce believer in Rod’s potential, but she loves him whether or not it is realized. The same goes for Dorothy’s own love for Jerry. “I love him for the man he almost is,” she tells her sister Laurel (Bonnie Hunt), operative word almost.

Jerry proposes to Dorothy when, realizing that their new business can’t afford an accountant, she decides to take a job in nearby San Diego. Crowe’s depiction of this moment, ordinarily the romcom’s joyful high point, emphasizes its sad desperation. Marrying Dorothy is less an expression of Jerry’s devotion than it is a way to safeguard her loyalty: as a husband, he can only see in her what she can see in him. When the shrewd Dorothy decides to call it quits – “I thought I was in love enough for both of us,” is how she describes their marriage’s imbalance – Jerry insists: “I’m not a guy who runs, I stick.” But “sticking” out of loyalty rather than love is not Dorothy’s idea of a happy marriage. She wants his soul, why not?

By the end of the movie, Jerry learns how to give it. He falls in love with Dorothy when he realizes that needs her even when there is nothing she can do for him, except be there. A criticism often leveled at Jerry Maguire is that it’s too long and digressive, but it earns its big emotional moment by putting Jerry and Dorothy through the wringer. Jerry’s speech doesn’t simply fulfill a genre expectation – it’s “the achievement of a new perspective on experience” that Cavell notes is a defining feature of the dialogue in remarriage comedies; it’s the expression of a profound personal transformation. “I miss my wife,” Jerry says, crying because it’s the first time he has experienced that feeling. It gets me every time.

• Jerry Maguire is available to rent digitally in the US, on Now TV in the UK and on Netflix in Australia