Starring Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, and Sam Neill. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, February 24, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Most people lead lives of quite desperation, although some get a bit noisy about it. Or maybe it's just that when filmmakers are as sensitive as Australian Rowan Woods shows himself to be in Little Fish, they bring you close enough to strangers to make their sighs sound like cannon shots.

In the end, the story offered here-directed by Woods (The Boys) from an original script by frequent collaborator Jacqueline Perske-doesn't have quite the payoff you're expecting, with the wrap-up too conventionally cathartic. But the characters are, in fact, defined by their inability to see past the obvious solutions, and the paralyzing pain, of their mundane situations.

The tale centres on Cate Blanchett's compelling Tracy, a smart, working-class cookie who would have made a good go of life if it weren't for bad breaks and an addictive personality. She lives in a suburb of Sydney known as Little Saigon, and a new round of trouble is triggered by the return of ex-boyfriend Johnny (21 Jump Street's Dustin Nguyen), newly back from supposedly cleaning up his act in Vancouver. Johnny is a slick holdover from a time when she got hooked on smack, and he is the cause of a brutal car crash that maimed her brother, played impressively by scraggle-haired Martin Henderson, unrecognizable from his stiff matinee-idol turn in Bride & Prejudice.

Speaking of reinvention, you may have to catch the credits to realize that Agent Smith himself, Hugo Weaving, is Lionel, a former football star now declining into drug-addled obscurity after letting down Tracy's mum (Aussie TV personality Noni Hazlehurst), who is having to support a coterie of no-hopers. Lionel, in turn, has switched his allegiance to a swanky drug dealer (Sam Neill, playing not-nice for a change) whose impending retirement threatens to upset a delicate balance.

Tracy, meanwhile, wants to cadge a bank loan to buy into the video-rental business she's been successfully managing. I could never quite figure out if this was meant to be the extent of our heroine's non-heroin ambitions or was as arbitrarily chosen as the tale's multiethnic setting. In any case, the director gives his terrific cast a lot of room to move, and his material is imbued with so much tension that it's hard not to get sucked into the gritty travails. It's never clear who these people would be if drugs and (subdued) violence weren't always on the near horizon, but Little Fish successfully casts such a unique spell that you'll be strangely glad you met Tracy and her troubled friends and family.