Starring Jennifer Lawrence. Rated PG.

The Miracle Mop is about as mundane a domestic tool as you can get, but David O. Russell turns its story into an exhilarating mix of goofball business caper and feminist quest.

But first, the bad news. Things do not start promisingly. In telling the rags-to-riches story of Long Island inventor Joy Mangano, Russell spends a long opening in the eccentric-family territory that made his Silver Linings Playbook so irritating. Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) is raising two kids in a small house she shares with a soap-opera-addled mom, Terry (a frumped-out Virginia Madsen in dated upside-down glasses); a father who’s moved back into the basement (Robert De Niro); her own Italian nightclub-crooner ex-husband (Édgar Ramirez); and a loving granny (Diane Ladd, as the only other sane one in the house). Working low-level jobs, Joy is struggling to pay the bills for the entire going-nowhere brood.

Just when you’re feeling trapped in the bungalow with them, Joy has her eureka moment. And as she fights to finance and sell her ingenious invention—a mop you don’t have to wring out by hand—the story finds its feet. She rides the success of the newly invented home-shopping channel, and her naive homemaker plays as nicely off Bradley Cooper’s sleek television salesman as she does her warm but hard-nosed financier (Isabella Rossellini). Lawrence doesn’t have a ton of range, but she finds Joy’s simple determination in the face of impossible odds—including a corporate world run by men who have never mopped a floor and the complexities of patent law and plastic moulds.

As he did in American Hustle, Russell dwells too fetishistically on the era-specific fashions and soundtrack. And let’s forgive the weird jaunts where Terry’s soap operas invade Joy’s dreams—complete with cameos by ’80s stars. (Donna Mills? Really?) But try to accept his idiosyncrasies: he’s stumbled onto a stellar little underdog tale here—the American Dream by way of the Home Shopping Network, with a little girl power thrown in.