Gabourey Sidibe (l) and Mo’Nique (r) both turn in stunning performances in Lee Daniels’s Precious.

Precious: Based on the Novel ``Push'' by Sapphire

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Precious is 16 years old, illiterate, obese, abused and pregnant — she has a heavy load and no destination to carry it to. Things start somewhere south of a Cinderella story for her, and in a lot of ways they end up worse, too, but her journey towards genuine hope and self-discovery contains far more satisfying revelations than the fit of a glass slipper. There's an evil stepmother, portrayed with bile and fire by Mo'Nique, whose terrifying, biblically jealous tantrums here feel like the stark emotive flipside of her joyous (and equally guttural) outbursts on her late-night talk show. Also a more-or-less absent father — though more would have been to the considerable betterment of all the film’s characters. And we certainly find a fairy godmother in disadvantaged youth teacher Ms. Blu Rain, the most weakly developed character, though glowingly portrayed by Paula Patton and lovingly captured by the camera.

Lee Daniels directs them all with a clear knack for capturing performances and fleshing out environments. He is able to bring a visceral quality to the film’s many violent physical and verbal conflicts, and he handles Precious's multiple flights of escapist fantasy with humanity and humour. Never has a pre-fab R&B music video set seemed so affecting and resonant, right down to the pulsing club beat and camera flashes that drown out the darkest elements of her reality. The film lingers on Precious's home life in late-’80s Harlem, even as events conspire rather quickly to lift her into newfound confidence and strength. This allows screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (working from the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire) to establish a sense of inertia, a mean groove in a young, heavily burdened life. Then things look up, fleetingly.

And that just leaves Gabourey Sidibe as our eponymous young heroine; the best for last. You'll forgive me for forgetting about her until now, as she disappears so completely into her role. The two are so inseparable that the idea of Precious being based on a character from a story — that this is not, in fact, an especially invasive, thoroughly dramatic documentary — becomes hard to maintain. Her performance really is quite something. The movie is, too. It looks past the stereotypes we so casually dismiss, embracing the reality behind them to bring what could have been condescending scratch notes on the downtrodden into vivid human focus.