Night Always Comes is a movie that will make nearly everyone feel seen, in the most uncomfortable way.

Vanessa Kirby stars as Lynette, who shares a little house in Portland with her mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her only brother, Kenny (Zach Robin Gottsagen), a 30-something who has Down syndrome and can’t live alone. The story spans 24 perilous hours in Lynette’s life. The owner is selling the house that Lynette, Doreen, and Kenny have been renting. Lynette wants to buy the house so they won’t have to move again, but she has no money and bad credit, so her mom will have to co-sign the deed and provide a $25,000 down payment. Doreen misses the meeting because she saw a “Mazda madness” sale on the way and decided to spend the down payment on a new vehicle instead, to “do something nice for myself for a change.” Lynette is told she can still have the house if she can raise $25,000 by the following morning and make sure her mom shows up. If she fails, the place will be sold to someone else.

Over the next day, Lynette visits every person in Portland that she can think of who might be able to part with thousands of dollars on short notice. Every stop on her journey tells us more about her. Lynette has part-time jobs at a bread factory, where she seems to be doing well, and as a waitress at a bar, where she’s reprimanded for always being late. She’s also taking a college course in economics, and we see her getting in trouble with the professor for bringing Kenny to class. (Lynette tells the prof. that her brother is “between facilities,” in such a way that we wonder if she’s telling the whole truth.) We see that Lynette has incredible energy and endurance, but is so overextended that she’s doing everything chaotically and sometimes badly, and is anxious all day long. The film is aware that this is now the default state of American life.

Lynette visits her former roommate, Gloria (Julia Fox), a local politician’s side-piece who lives in his swanky apartment. Lynette loaned Gloria $4000 years ago when she was in a crisis, and now wants repayment. Gloria gives a list of weak, insulting justifications for not giving her the money, but gives Lynette a set of keys and asks her to stay there to watch for a package she’s expecting. This gives Lynette the means, motive, and opportunity to abscond with a safe in the master bedroom closet. Things get wilder from there.

This is a downbeat, harrowingly tense film about poor people who live every day at their breaking point, working themselves to exhaustion in a country that would barely notice if they died. It’s beautifully constructed and executed, with a lead character who reveals new biographical and emotional layers to us with each new scene, and a backup cast stocked with small-scale underworld types.

This could have been a contrived and even cartoonish movie, but it consistently errs on the side of believability, recounting a series of encounters that are so frightening that the people who survived them will think about them for the rest of their lives, but that might not be considered important enough to warrant a local TV news story, or even a police investigation.

Night Always Comes combines elements of old-fashioned hardboiled crime thrillers and the so-called “women’s pictures” in which a heroine uses her wits and charisma, and sometimes her body, to achieve a goal or escape a bad situation. But in its heart, this is a grubby, earthbound, 1970s-style character study, about a person who has one foot in the criminal world and the other in the straight world. Lynette can never leave the criminal world behind because it’s full of people who will help her when she gets in trouble, because they owe her something, or want her to owe them something.

Kirby seems a little too upper-middle-class in demeanour in some of the early scenes, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that this is a mask she puts on when she’s existing in “civilised” spaces. Kirby is excellent in all of the particulars of the role, including scenes where Lynette keeps suppressing and suppressing her anger until she can’t hold it in anymore and explodes in protest or rage. When Lynette navigates overwhelmingly male-coded, often dangerous spaces, we get to see how a woman can achieve what she wants in such environments.

Lynette’s psychology is complex, and parts of it are believably at odds with each other. By the time we reach the end of the movie, we’ve learned a great deal about what drives her, including a few details and observations that alter our perspective on her. But there is still much more that we don’t know. Instead of leaving us to choose between the usual movie-watcher’s binary of “I liked her/I didn’t like her,” we come away with a deeper understanding of Lynette and the world she hopes to leave behind.