Vanessa Kirby is riveting in the taut thriller Night Always Comes

Vlautin’s 20+ novels and 14 alt-country albums are all based in Portland, Oregon, and so is this film.

Night Always Comes stars an actress who elevates anything she’s in - Vanessa Kirby.

She stole scenes from Her Majesty in The Crown, and from Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, and received an Oscar nomination for the harrowing 2020 melodrama Pieces of a Woman.

In Night Always Comes, Kirby is Lynette, a woman barely holding her family together – a deadbeat mother, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a brother with Down syndrome, played by Zack Gottsagen.

Lynette holds down several low-wage jobs, but she’s still in debt. Her one chance is to buy the house they’re renting.

All they need is $US25,000, and they’ve finally raised it. Or have they?

Because mum’s blown the lot on a car. Lynette’s faced with the question: can she raise that money again by tomorrow morning?

In other words, a classic, ticking-clock scenario, $US25,000? It might as well be $US25 million, unless Lynette can pull something out of the hat.

But as a former escort, she may know someone who can help. Except her old clients don’t go to people like Lynette to help them.

There’s a terrific scene between Kirby and Randall Park that underlines exactly what the balance of power is in this sort of relationship.

The desperate Lynette manages to get away with his car. Can she leverage a stolen car towards a few thousand bucks?

Before she risks that, she decides to collect on a few outstanding debts. And each time she risks being worse off than when she started.

The whole night – the whole movie – is spent scraping together not quite enough money from people and places she thought she’d got away from.

And each step is a reminder of the power of the haves – businessmen, corrupt politicians, drug dealers and pimps – over the have-nots, like Lynette and her family.

Night Always Comes is directed by Benjamin Caron, who worked with Kirby on The Crown, and then went on to even bigger things with the Star Wars spinoff Andor.

This is like neither – a classic, drive-all-night, noir thriller that sees Lynette playing an all-night game of snakes and ladders.

She wins, she loses, she wins again with certain provisos, she loses because she trusted the wrong man.

The only person she can always rely on is the only one who can’t help – her brother Kenny, played sweetly by Zack Gottsagen.

Above all, Night Always Comes is a one-woman show, as Kirby puts Lynette through the wringer.

And for all my reservations about “stunt-casting” – getting people to play spectacularly against type – the usually posh English Kirby is as riveting and committed as always.

I’m delighted at Kirby's blockbuster success, of course, in The Fantastic Four and several upcoming Avengers movies. A girl’s got to eat, after all.

But Night Always Comes is a reminder – and I don’t want to sound snobby here – that Kirby is so much better than that.

Ah well – as Princess Margaret probably said – would that twere so simple.

Listen to Simon Morris review the latest films in At The Movies, available here or on Sundays at 1.30pm on RNZ National.