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Trailer for "Waitress"

Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress shows the late writer-director’s broad familiarity with, and affection for, a lot of pop culture— especially the exaggerations of southern gothic comedy-dramas like Steel Magnolias and TV sitcoms such as “My Name is Earl” and “Alice.”

Waitress quickly embroils us in the winsomely portrayed workaday lives of the three-woman waiting staff of “Joe’s Pie Diner,” located somewhere in the deep south. It could be in Louisiana, given that the local paper is called The Picayune. Or we could be returning to Mayberry, which would be appropriate since Andy Griffith shows up at the diner.

Of the three women at Joe’s, the movie concentrates on Jenna (Keri Russell), clear-eyed, resolute, perky and the youngest one. The most notable, and worrisome, element in her life is her marriage to Earl (Jeremy Sisto), a clownishly narcissistic lout who dominates her to a seriously pathological extent. Earl doesn’t just demand obedience, he also wants loving loyalty. (“Just do as I tell you and I can’t get too mad.”)

Jenna’s are the pies in the diner’s name. She is a marvel of a pastry chef who is planning to use her rare skills to make her escape from Earl by winning a large cash prize in a pie-baking contest. Until, that is, she discovers she is with child after an uncommon episode of intimacy with Earl. This leads the angry, self-lacerating Jenna to come up with another of her biographically pointed pie names: “Recipe for Baby Screaming its Head Off in the Middle of the Night and Ruining My Whole Life Pie.”

Back at Joe’s she consorts with the salty, chain-smoking Becky (Cheryl Hines) and diffident, lovelorn Dawn (Shelly). Periodically Joe himself (Griffith) pays a visit, to sample Jenna’s latest confectionary triumph and give one of his demandingly detailed orders to the waitresses. (Of course, only Jenna can handle him.)

Meanwhile, Jenna’s new problem leads her to the office and into the arms of the earnest, slightly nervous and also married Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillian), who’s soon mad about more than her baked goods.

The whole enterprise, like many of its antecedents, might be taking place in a town called Quirkville. The eccentric piquancy could very easily pall and overwhelm the movie, and critical honesty impels me to report that this comes perilously close to happening more than once. Also, there’s an ominously anomalous pachyderm lurking near the center of the movie: The decidedly unfunny abusive potential of Earl, a problem Shelly never entirely manages to surmount.

What keeps all this from becoming less than sapid is the verve and cleverness of the cast, and Shelly’s affectionate deployment of her abilities. Russell is a gifted, sharply adept comedienne. Her Jenna is a warm comic creation. And Griffith imparts an old-master burnish to his limited screen time as the unconvincingly overbearing Joe.

Shelly shows more than a penchant for rube color and faux low-brow wit. Waitress evinces a sympathy for actors and a fondness for durable old movie conventions and genres—in particular for madcap romantic comedy. Shelly wasn’t afraid to indulge in broadly achieved effects and arbitrary but usually amusing changes of pace. Waitress may not always cohere, but it retains a piquant energy.

It also comes with an inescapably poignant provenance. In November, shortly before her movie debuted at Sundance, the filmmaker was killed in the Greenwich Village building where she kept her office, the victim of a supremely senseless murder.

It’s only one of the lesser results of this crime that her movie is a testament to her gifts instead of just the winningly executed work it would otherwise have been perceived to be.