Compared to the intensity of last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne is taking a stroll through the inspiring yet routine assembly of Tow. It’s a true story that favors a calmer route for one dealing with bureaucracy, homelessness, and the way relationships can crumble under so much stress. Yet the stress has this nearly maddening glaze of ease, as if there is always someone behind our shoulder with a blanket and cocoa, assuring us everything will be okay. As odd as that comfort might be for a frighteningly relatable tale, the effort put forth is almost enough to ignore the hideous libertarian in the distance, ready to slap this picture with approval for its bootstrap-pulling.

The story of Amanda Ogle (portrayed by Byrne) feels as though it should have an extra dose of discomfort. She’s a vet tech who struggles to find work and is living out of her car, pridefully trying to keep her dire situation hidden from her daughter in another state. When her car is stolen, she’s frantic to have it recovered, as it’s her only source of housing and her means of getting another job. Frustration boils over when the car is recovered, but the tow truck company refuses to release it without payment. This sounds nerve-wracking, but Amanda endures the paperwork route in her pink attire, hair tied up, looking as though she’s about to finish a batch of laundry after taking care of the system.

Of course, it takes much longer to get her car back than expected. A slight delay turns into a legal battle that spans a year, with Amanda seeking every option to get her car back. There are a few familiar faces who play up to their roles in this mission for her old automobile. Dominic Sessa is predictably plucky as the young lawyer trying to work with Amanda, a prospect she reluctantly agrees to, given that he’s younger than her vehicle. Octavia Spencer is the insightful yet tough homeless shelter manager with a perfect balance of sympathy and sternness in her rules. Demi Lovato and Ariana DeBose melt into the roles of fellow homeless women who befriend Amanda, their plights placing some perspective on Amanda’s situation. There’s mild charm in Simon Rex playing the just-doing-my-job tow-truck employee, and the scheming lawyer for the tow company, played by Corbin Bernsen, does come off almost cartoonishly evil, but damned if it doesn’t feel like the truth in this world.

The tone is light enough that it rarely feels maddening, letting the darker questions about our homeless and legal system fall by the wayside as we root for this one case. There’s a whole lot of work montages where we watch as Byrne struggles to make some cash while Sessa embarks on a never-ending quest to get Bernsen on the phone. The pitfalls in Amanda’s fight are often graced, but rarely drag her further down. After a big win and a bigger defeat, she resorts to booze, which almost gets her kicked out of the shelter for good, where she almost engages in street tricks to make ends meet. There’s an admirable quality to how sure Amanda was of her case that she kept at it for so long, but also an empty feeling about the stories that don’t have this happy ending. Not every poor woman gets this far with getting back their car and receives a biopic starring an Oscar-nominated actress. That said, a victory is a victory, and the film at least doesn’t hold back in stressing, in the textual epilogue, that Amanda never received an apology or even a charged battery for her car upon release.

Tow is a movie where the performances shine most over an underdog story that hits so many familiar notes with a predictable rhythm. Byrne is wonderful to watch, even when cranking down her anxiety to match this picture’s lighter touch, built for a rousing monologue in the climax. Sessa and Spencer delivered what I expected, but it’s hard to argue they’re not good at what they were cast for. Despite the solid acting, I still felt these actors deserved better, just as I felt Amanda deserved more from the capitalist system that nearly destroyed her life for refusing to give her car back. But sometimes you just take what little wins you can get, and I can’t deny there’s some satisfaction in Byrne’s anxiously amusing delivery of the line “Give me back my car, bitch!”

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