Edie Falco leads a tongue-in-cheek comedy

In one of the best scenes in I'll be right therea character reveals a family history involving an unlikely getaway driver. The one taking in this story is the middle-aged daughter, who knows a thing or two about driving, though her role behind the wheel is more akin to shuffling around than running away. These two strong women are played, respectively, by Jeannie Berlin and Edie Falco, actresses of ineffable matter-of-factness. When, later in the film, the screen fills with a slow-motion shot of them running side by side down a hospital corridor, it seems like a winking, loving gift, one of the dizzying dividends of this wry take on family and middle-aged anxieties.

Set and filmed in a northeastern village (Pearl River, Rockland County, New York), the second feature film by director Brendan Walsh (after Celsius) is a modestly sized film that benefits from its understated sense of place and superb cast. I'll be right there treads a path between the comforting and the prickly, just as its central character, Falco's Wanda, tired of being the voice of reason amid a sea of ​​drama, balances reasonable exasperation with deep wells of patience as she cares for one struggling family member after another.

Wanda is a divorced mother of two more or less adult children. Her daughter Sarah (Kayli Carter) is eight months pregnant and has decided to get married in church, before her due date, to Eugene (Jack Mulhern), a level-headed guy who is as easygoing as he is hysterical. Wanda's troubled son, Mark (Charlie Tahan of Ozarkswho will reunite with Carter in the Bob Dylan biopic A complete stranger), has overcome addiction issues but maintains a slippery relationship with the truth, much to the chagrin of his therapist (Geoffrey Owens).

Wanda's ex-husband, Henry (Bradley Whitford), has his hands full with a new brood of kids and is a bit of a whiny boy himself. Her meek boyfriend, Marshall, played with unexpected restraint by Michael Rapaport, is in the silent grip of a kind of existential angst. He makes a meaningless marriage proposal and then, shortly thereafter, retracts it, embarrassed that he's gone too far. Even if she weren't cheating on Marshall, having recently discovered her sapphic side, marrying him would be the last thing on Wanda's list of goals. If she had one.

His relationship with the young university professor Sophie (Sepideh Moafi, by Black Bird AND The Killing of Two Lovers) is a secret, but not one she guards too closely. Henry and Sarah's responses to the revelation are sharply written and acted, but more to the point is Wanda's realization that the romance isn't all that much. Sophie, who excels at compartmentalizing, tends to show up on Wanda's porch at odd hours, sometimes drunk and always horny.

And then there's Wanda's newfound friendship with Albert (Michael Beach), a high school classmate who's recently moved back to town. While his being a firefighter and a devoted divorced father might be too easy a shortcut to serious, solid goodness, there's also something refreshing and winning about the way he's both flustered and impressed when Wanda mentions his bisexual relationship status.

Working from a script by Jim Beggarly (A Country Called Home, A year and a change), Walsh struggles at first to find the desired tone between dark comedy and something more anodyne, even with Falco and Berlin at the center of the opening sequence, which centers on 68-year-old Grace (Berlin) receiving a better-than-expected cancer diagnosis. The dark humor feels forced, and the insistent pep of James Righton’s score is too much. Things calm down and find their balance with Tahan’s first scene, which provides a jolt of more complicated humor.

Answering SOS messages from Grace, Sarah, and Mark at all hours, Wanda is always on call; the film’s title is an emotional refrain. At the helm of her blue station wagon, she spends much of her days crisscrossing the city offering comfort and succor. It’s at night that she plies her work as an accountant. The scenes in which she keeps the books in the bars and restaurants of the small town are alive with something quotidian but unexpected, captured vividly by Aaron Medick’s camerawork, while Righton’s score takes on a harrowing yet effective thrum. (Elsewhere, it hits perfect comic notes.) There’s quality family time, too, captured in scenes at a local ice cream shop, where three generations of women talk about, or of, what’s happening. Or what happened decades ago.

It would be an exaggeration to call this film an actors' showcase, but it is certainly an actors' film, which may explain the involvement as executive producers of Falco and Jesse Eisenberg (who appeared in Free samples(the first Beggarly-produced screenplay). In addition to Wanda’s interactions with other characters, complete with eye rolls and precise application of the skeptical raised eyebrow, Falco finds the fine line in a pair of game-changing meltdowns, with Rapaport and Berlin both providing the perfect counterweight. Falco and Whitford are pitch-perfect in the select scenes they share, slipping effortlessly into the well-worn grooves and rhythms of their characters’ animosity.

Carter and Tahan bring nuance to their more broadly written roles, while Berlin keeps you hooked on everything about her, not least the syncopated rhythms of her line readings, especially when the lines have a snap built into them. “It’s not gambling,” the casino regular tells his daughter, “if you know how to play.”

Falco, engaging as ever, may not be taking a risky gamble here, but there’s risk in the way she and the film circle toward a tidy conclusion. And there’s wisdom in the way they end up somewhere much messier, sweeter, and more satisfying.