Prime J-Law; shame the other characters are so awful

Rating: 6/10 (30 September 2017)

Jennifer Lawrence plays Joy, a beleaguered housewife/TSA agent who invents a self-wringing mop and successfully promotes it on the newly hatched QVC network. This success is despite the relentless stress of having divorced/estranged parents, an ex-husband, two children, and her grandmother all living under her roof and each with his or her own selfish peculiarities. Well, maybe not kindly grandma, who narrates the story.
See, first there's dad Rudy (Robert DeNiro), who's just been kicked out of his current wife's (or girlfriend's, not sure) house – "I'm done with him – you can have him back" – and who owns and operates a repair shop that happens to have a gun range. Rudy's the sort of guy who rubs just about everyone the wrong way, but of course Joy puts up with his shenanigans. Then there's mom Terry (an unrecognizable Virginia Madsen), who spends almost all of her time in her room watching her stories and flushing her hair down the toilet, which inevitably clogs. There's passionate ex Tony (Edgar Ramirez), who has a good heart if a lack of direction and who lives in the basement. And there's grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd), who seems to be the only sensible, nurturing person in the house. There's also Joy's half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm), who doesn't live on the premises but may as well – and she herself has sort of a passive-aggressive love-hate relationship with the ironically named Joy.
Aggravating family aside, Joy – a longtime lover of creating things – stumbles upon the need for the aforementioned mop. Up until then, mop heads were permanently attached to the mop handle and couldn't be cleaned without the user touching the nasty thing. Joy discovers that winding a single strand of wool hundreds of times around a base, the mop head not only becomes more absorbent it also becomes easily detached. One can put it in the washing machine! One won't need to buy a new mop every few months! This discovery leads to much success and with it the downsides of running a business – particularly when the business involves your quirky family as well as Dad's new girlfriend, Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), who invests heavily in Joy's venture. Lot of people to please. Lot of potential for things to go wrong, too, when one is a novice in the world of business.
(I don't even want to get into Bradley Cooper's character, the head of programming at QVC. Cooper is a little too subtle in his role, almost the point of invisibility. Talk about underwhelming.) Okay, enough plot exposition. Lawrence is winning as always and, in fact, elevates her character with more sincerity and moxie than the script allows. But she's about the only actor who does a lot with flimsy material. DeNiro's character is overbearing and obnoxious; Rossellini's even more so. Joy's rotten half-sister comes off as devious, resentful, and despicable, but prior to Joy's success there was no hint of acrimony. I get it, she's jealous of the success, but there's nothing to back up the attitude. Those characters all feel like they should be in a much broader film, not a character study. In other words, the tone adopted by them is at odds with that adopted by Joy; the two types clash, rather than contrast.
Joy is a sufficiently entertaining movie, and it's almost entirely due to Lawrence's strong performance. Director David O. Russell, who also co-wrote the script, has done better.