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With her blazing performance in last year's "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" still fresh in Oscar-nom memory, Rose Byrne is gripping yet again in "Tow," a movie poorly served by its terrible title. I saw it last Saturday night, the day after it opened, in a theater with three, maybe four other people. We were pretty well served, for the most part. The movie's structure is a little lumpy, but the up-from-underdog story, drawn from a 2018 newspaper feature, offers a classic ration of proletarian bite-back. And Byrne is once again terrific.

Standing out in a solid cast, she plays Amanda Ogle, a 40-something woman knocking around Seattle trailing remnants of her punky youth -- ratty band shirts, a black leather jacket, a pair of dusty Doc Martens. She's a bottle blonde in a pink headscarf, and her home is her car, a 1991 Toyota Camry that's seen better days, none of them recent.

One day, after scoring a job in a doggy daycare shop (she has a vet-tech license, but no college degree), Amanda discovers that her beloved wheels have been stolen. Soon she learns the car is being held in a tow-truck lot that wants $273 to return it to her. Amanda doesn't have $273 at the moment, and doesn't know if she ever will again.

Now we see the relentless jaws of officialdom begin to grind down on this woman. Amanda fights back, representing herself in a suit against the towing company for the return of her car. And amazingly, she wins the judgment -- but the company simply refuses to give the car back. As many another helpless schnook before her has wondered: What can you do?

Fortunately, after a fully homeless night spent sleeping on a park bench, Amanda has wangled her way into a women's shelter program at a local church, where a strict disciplinarian named Barbara (Octavia Spencer) brooks no nonsense from her down-and-out residents, among them street-tough Ariana DeBose (in a winningly feisty performance) and Demi Lovato.

Amanda has no choice but to attend the shelter's 12-step meetings, but at first she doesn't join the other women in standing to relate the personal troubles that brought her to this low point in her life -- she can't admit to herself how low she's actually fallen. Her initial reluctance to share her story keeps us on the outside, too -- although we get an idea of how much she's lost whenever the movie pauses to let her make phone contact with her teenage daughter, Avery (Elsie Fisher, the star of Bo Burnham's fine 2018 indie, "Eighth Grade"), who is stashed back in Utah and pretty ground-down herself by her footloose mom's string of broken promises.

Every good underdog story comes with a resourceful white knight attached, and Amanda is taken up by a nerdy young lawyer named Kevin Eggers (Dominic Sessa), a consumer-law specialist whose mission is to help people being crushed by heartless corporate power. People like Amanda. When the towing company -- represented by a high-powered attorney named LaRosa (Corbin Bernsen) -- tells Amanda she can have her car back as soon as she's paid the $21,000 it's accumulated in fines and fees and general BS, Kevin erupts into action. Unfortunately, his biggest enemy is time, and the endless paperwork that eats it up. He fights back hard by calling in a reporter for The Seattle Times, who shines a bright light on the situation with a major story, and ... well you get the idea.

As good as the cast is, the movie is undermined somewhat by director Stephanie Laing's willingness to distract us with cute puppies and untethered action (like Lovato's overdone a cappella rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"). Eventually, we learn that Amanda's basic problems are the usual drink and drugs, and maybe the childhood sexual trauma referenced in the movie's most stirring scene, in which she finally levels with the rest of her group. "I want to live," she tells them. "And I need help."

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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