This soft-spoken yet gut-punching low-budget drama stars Jennifer Lawrence as Lynsey, a military veteran newly returned from Afghanistan and recovering from injuries and a serious case of PTSD. Lynsey isn’t comfortable being back in New Orleans: military service meant an escape from her boozy mother Gloria (Linda Emond) and other domestic troubles. But with nowhere else to go, she bunks at the family home while she recovers, taking a menial job cleaning pools.

A warm friendship starts to kindle with James (Brian Tyree Henry, superb), the garage owner Lynsey hires to fix a truck that seemingly belonged to her absent brother. It transpires that James is missing his sister, whose own absence is explained later on. They develop a surrogate sibling relationship, a bond seldom explored in such depth in cinema. It’s novel too that, though the film acknowledges that James is black and Lynsey white, their different backgrounds don’t dominate the story.

As the title might suggest, Causeway is about in-between states of mind and transitional points in life. As good-hearted if, like the rest of us, moderately flawed people, James and Lynsey want to help each other get to the other side. Inevitably that results in missteps and misunderstandings — the script is diagrammatic in places — but director Lila Neugebauer, making her feature debut, elicits finely underplayed performances from the cast.

Lawrence seems to be returning to her roots here, in the kind of risky, gritty, minimal-make-up indie cinema that brought her acclaim at the beginning of her career in films such as Winter’s Bone. She also gets to demonstrate how good she is at collaborating with other performers, harmonising with Henry and Emond for a series of gorgeous actorly duets.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas and on Apple TV Plus now