Joy (2015)

Jennifer Lawrence is a good actress, killing it in basically every role she has ever taken and Joy is no exception.
She's dead-broke, her dead-beat but kind ex-husband, Tony (Edgar Ramirez) living in her basement, her mother, Terry (Virginia Madsen) stuck in her bedroom wasting her life away in front of the TV filling her head with lame soap operas and now her father, Rudy (Robert De Niro) has been dumped by his girlfriend so she has to divide the basement to fit him too.
She is brilliant but had to stay at home to care for her mother and help her father with his business but that changes when she gets another idea for a self-wringing mop. She is on the boat of her father's new girlfriend, Trudy (Isabella Rossellini) and a few wine glasses broke on the boat deck and she gets her hand's all scratched up by wringing out the mop filled with glass shards. And now the film really begins. Joy's story is interesting the film moves along quickly, her struggling to get her product patented, to find a factory that would make her products and then to finally sell her product. She finally meets Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper) who works for QVC, he was an old friend of Tony's and Joy doesn't exactly know what she's getting into. He takes on her product but the spokes model botches its TV debut. So Joy takes matters into her own hands and urges him to sell it on TV herself and fortunately, her life-long friend Jackie (Dascha Polanco) calls in and gets Joy to stop focusing on the bright lights and the product sells itself, which is good as Joy took out a second mortgage on her house and is up past her eyeballs in debt only her battle isn't over. The factory out in California ups the price on the parts needed and her half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm) makes matters worse leaving Joy to head out there herself. Once there, she discovers that Trudy's lawyer didn't know what he was doing when he researched her patent and now the company owns her idea. Fortunately, Joy stays up all night reading the fine print on her contract and fortunately, discovers that they never owned her idea and that the person who had a similar idea didn't know if said idea would actually work so Joy comes out on top and will go on to become a millionaire.
Now, the film is a little weird, using magical realism from time to time, letting Joy live in the soap operas her mother adores and Diane Lane as the grandmother, unrecognizable, is the narrator only she dies halfway through the film is an odd choice and while the film takes place mostly in 1995, it looks like it takes place earlier, with a cell phone never appearing at all. I wish the ending would have been different with her success being shown differently instead of Joy walking down the street like she owned it.
Fortunately, though Lawrence is too young for the role, she is excellent. Everyone else is pretty good but she is amazing, lifting this film to something above a mediocre film and that is impressive. Grade: B+