Months from now, and even years from now, someone is going to ask if you’ve seen Small Engine Repair. I believe this because it’s exactly the kind of unassuming little film that takes time to find its audience — living through word of mouth, one conversation at a time. So why not just see it right now?

Written and directed by John Pollono, adapting his own 2011 award-winning play of the same name, the movie centers on one family — both biological and unofficial — in working-class Manchester, New Hampshire. Ex-con single-dad mechanic Frank (Pollono) is struggling with his only child, Crystal (Ciara Bravo, 2021’s Cherry), leaving home for UCLA. A tomboy writ large, she essentially has been raised by three dads, although not always simultaneously: Frank and his two lifelong best friends, macho Terry (Jon Bernthal, Sicario) and meek Packie (the ever-reliable Shea Whigham, Joker). Amid this flanneled trifecta of testosterone, it’s fun to watch Bravo so at ease, giving as good as she gets.

One night, the men’s iron-tight bond snaps. Months later, Frank reaches out to Terry and Packie, seemingly to make amends, but he has an ulterior motive: He needs a favor — for which he can trust no one else. Small Engine Repair is best appreciated if you go in with no more context than Frank gives his friends.

The second half of Small Engine Repair works as well as it does because Pollono invests so much time up front getting you invested in his characters. Relevant details of their complicated relationship and shared history, which have a way of helping determine their collective future, are skillfully peppered in versus dumped in lazy exposition. Only in first painting a realistic blue-collar portrait is Pollono able to throw the narrative into a new direction that threatens your blood pressure and keeps you along for the ride.

For Pollono (screenwriter of David Gordon Green’s Boston Marathon bombing drama, Stronger), this marks an exceptionally strong directorial debut. Obviously the man knows his own material inside and out, down to each and every well-placed “fuckin’,” and that confidence results in a work that continues to resonate with me weeks later. Like the William Friedkin/Tracy Letts collaborations Bug and Killer Joe, it proves that plays with turns of the perverse and felonious stand the best chance of generating sparks onscreen. —Rod Lott