Not long into On the Basis of Sex, future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (played by Felicity Jones) undresses and falls into bed with her husband, Martin (Armie Hammer). The love scene is brief and tasteful—but it felt much longer Sunday night, watching it in an audience that also held Hillary Clinton, and Gloria Steinem, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself. It was like watching a sex scene with your parents, multiplied by a hundred uncomfortable throat clearings.

“Well, my children are in the audience,” Ginsburg said during a panel discussion after the screening at Lincoln Center Sunday night, when asked about her simulated display of affection. “And I think they would probably agree their daddy would have loved it.” Clinton, whose husband appointed Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993 and was given a standing ovation at the outset of the film, was not afforded the chance to comment on what that experience was like for her.

The film follows the Ginsburgs’ supportive partnership in all things, from their shared time at Harvard to the first case they argued in court together, a gender-discrimination dispute brought before the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1971. Director Mimi Leder had the benefit of securing not only Ginsburg’s blessing but also her critical eye: the justice helped to revise the movie’s script, which was written by her nephew, Daniel Stiepleman. She “gave up the job of editor” around the third round, Ginsburg said; her daughter, Jane, took it from there, helping with the next seven or so revisions.

Ultimately, R.B.G. was happy with the result: “This film is part fact, part imaginative. . . . But the imaginative parts fit in with the story so well,” she said Sunday—adding that one such creative flare was the climactic scene in which on-screen Ruth falters at first under the weight of a judge’s questioning. “I didn’t stumble at the outset,” Ginsburg said.

The single apocryphal moment Ginsburg couldn’t abide was that the Harvard law students were shown doing the twist—a dance that had not yet been invented at the time that scene was set. (She caught it the first time she viewed the film, and that moment was eventually edited for the final product, with some difficulty, she said.) Mostly, though, the justice was thrilled with her portrayal. “The most remarkable thing is to hear Felicity Jones, who speaks the Queen’s English, sound very much like she was born and bred in Brooklyn,” she said. (Jones said in a V.F. cover story that she worked with dialect coach Naomi Joy Todd to perfect Ginsburg’s Brooklynese, which linguists have noted was strong when she was younger, before she made her voice more palatable to the male WASPs who dominated the courts.)

And what of Hammer playing her beloved Marty? “I commented when I first met Armie that he was rather taller than Marty. And his answer was, ‘And you are rather shorter than Felicity Jones.’”

Asked to comment on more recent history, Justice Ginsburg brought great tidings of good health, confirming that though she broke three ribs in November, she’s back on her famously rigorous workout routine with her trainer. “The first week of the fall, we could do only legs,” she said. “But now I’m up to everything, even plank.” Ginsburg, who has fans in feminists and constitutional law nerds alike, proved that she has fight in her yet. When goaded into offering some sort of salve for these divided times, she appropriately quoted her late husband: “I think there will be a way back; I can’t predict that I’ll see it in my lifetime, but one of the things that Marty often said about the country that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle; it is the pendulum, and if it goes too far in one direction, it’s going to swing back.”

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