Don't sleep on the warm and winning 'Support the Girls'

I never saw a single trailer or read a single review of Support the Girls when it came out last year, it was totally not on my radar. In fact, it was only when Regina Hall, an actress best known for great performances in broad comedies, started picking up critics awards that I sought it out.

On the surface, it's an amiable, slice-of-life workplace the comedy, the kind that you don't see much anymore, certainly not on the big screen. It is funny, warm-hearted and occasionally bittersweet, but it also has a lot more going on in it.

The plot -- which covers a whirlwind 48 hours in and around a Hooters-like bar -- manages to be about nothing and everything. It's a terrific showcase for Hall to be sure, she plays the put-upon manager of the place who is also something of a den mother and confidant for the women who work for her. But the film also features a dynamite support cast, with the two biggest standouts being Shayna McHale and Haley Lu Richardson as two loyal servers at the aptly named establishment -- Double Whammies.

It's a feminist mission statement without ever feeling preachy or sentimental. It all feels incredible real and poignant -- the sniveling self important owner, the more corporate competition ('Mancave') fronted by a gloriously un-self-aware Brooklyn Decker, the occasionally irate and almost always disrespectful customers -- this is a world and a hard ass life that just never gets the full cinematic treatment it deserves.

Sure, terrific movies like Office Space hint at the casual humiliation heaped on working stiffs, but that comedy is more broad and silly, so its easier for audiences to swallow. But Support the Girls is striving for something far more realistic and gut wrenching.

Hall is not just the character trying to hold everything together, she's also an audience surrogate of the first order, she's just as bewildered and bemused as we are by the chaos that surrounds her. It's a strange little journey she goes on in the film -- outrageous things happen -- but in such a naturalistic and believable way that I never questioned their authenticity.

And although it may all seem low stakes -- Hall is basically altruistic to a fault -- it's everything to these characters, and again, these are people who are usually on the margins of mainstream films, not at the center of them.

This little gem deserved a wider audience than it received last year, I myself didn't have enough time to see it before awards season and top 10 lists, but it's a special little movie that really moved me in surprising ways.