December 27, 2015 -- Jennifer Lawrence gives another great performance as a woman under a lot of stress trying to run a successful business against long odds. In this biographical drama based on the life of Joy Mangano, Lawrence plays the title character.

While the film bounces awkwardly between two different time periods in Mangano's life, it works best when it sticks to the later period, when Mangano, a divorced woman raising three children, decides to start her own business, making a self-wringing mop she invented.

Joy's home life is crazy, with her mother (played by Virginia Madsen of “Sideways”) watching soap operas all day, her divorced father (Robert De Niro) and her ex-husband, Tony (Edgar Ramirez of “Deliver Us From Evil”) living in the basement. Her father has his own auto repair business, and his girlfriend, Trudy (Isabella Rossellini) is a wealthy widow.

Joy asks her father and Trudy for financial help to make and market her invention, a very absorbent cotton strand mop that can be wrung with a lever, no need to touch the mop head. They agree to help develop the invention, but problems arise when a patent search turns up a similar invention in Hong Kong. Joy is advised by Trudy to deal with a businessman in Texas, paying him a royalty for the patent and using a manufacturing facility he owns in California. Tony's objections to this deal are overruled by the rest of the family.

Joy tries to sell the mop locally, but doesn't have much luck. Tony puts her in touch with Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper of “American Sniper”) who agrees to sell the mop on the QVC cable channel. She agrees to quickly manufacture 50,000 mops to sell on the network, forcing her to go deep into debt. The initial sales show on QVC was a flop, so Joy insisted on selling the mop on TV herself. With the aid of her longtime friend, Jackie (Dascha Polanco of “Gimme Shelter”) she manages to increase sales of the mop dramatically.

Production costs and setbacks continue to plague the business, and after a disastrous business trip to California by Joy's sister, Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm of “American Hustle”) Joy finds herself bankrupt. Facing the loss of her home, she comes up with a daring plan to get back on track.

This is a remarkable tale of Joy Mangano's determination, intelligence and work ethic, which enabled her to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles to success, including a lot of bad business and legal advice from people who should have known better. In one of the year's best performances, Jennifer Lawrence embodies these inspiring qualities on screen, ably backed by a talented cast, including Diane Ladd, who plays Mangano's supportive grandmother.

The film tries very hard to show how Mangano's genius was buried for 17 years, like a cicada, before emerging. There are numerous flashbacks to her as a child (played by Isabella Crovetti-Cramp) and some dream and fantasy sequences, too. I thought these attempts to relate Mangano's success to her childhood didn't really work well. I think the screenplay worked much better when the emphasis was on Mangano as an adult. Nevertheless, the film works well enough overall to recommend it. It rates a B.

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Copyright © 2015 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
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