Starring Brooke Johnson and Maya Ritter. Rating unavailable. Opens Friday, June 6, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

There is a rich vein of material to be explored in the tale of an abortion-clinic worker, her struggle to retain custody of her deceased partner’s daughter while under attack by zealots, and the daily interactions of latchkey kids in a strained urban setting. But Finn’s Girl plays a lot better on paper than it does on-screen.

With her short gray hair and piercingly intelligent gaze, Brooke Johnson certainly looks the part of Finn Jeffries, a fertility specialist who also works at a much-threatened women’s clinic (actually Toronto’s Morgentaler Clinic). But she has a leaden delivery that brings little to the tone-deaf dialogue handed her by writer Laurie Colbert, who codirected with Dominique Cardona in their feature debut after years as a doc-making team.

Johnson has many scenes with young Maya Ritter as Zelly, the 11-year-old daughter of Finn’s common-law, same-sex spouse, who died several years earlier. These characters have an uneasy, although not particularly combative relationship—a state of permanent truce, you could say. Unfortunately, young Ritter (who strongly resembles Anne of Green Gables–era Megan Follows) smirks and grins through every confrontation, and the parent-child dynamic is too opaque to be easily read. Somewhat better is the girl’s shenanigans with two school pals (Chantel Cole and the very good Andrew Chalmers).

Even there, the dialogue is overloaded with after-school-special significance, much as the film itself is stuffed with more drama than it can handle. The doctor is plagued by religious nuts, and while carrying on a shallow affair with a coworker (Nathalie Toriel) she is also batting with Zelly’s nominal father (Richard Clarkin), who is also a professional rival. Finn is protected by an odd couple of plainclothes cops (Yanna McIntosh and Gilles Lemaire), who seem to have no other assignments. Sparks are struck with the female officer—although this development, and the film’s forcedly upbeat ending, are too clumsily handled to take seriously.

In short, Finn’s Girl is a good story about intriguing characters. Too bad it settles for the ordinary at almost every turn.