Directed by David O. Russell, the film stars Jennifer Lawrence as Joy, the titular role.

    The film records the life of Joy Mangano (Lawrence) across four decades*. The big turning point in Joy’s life, and her major claim to fame, is her invention of the self-wringing Miracle Mop, which she launched and personally hawked* on the QVC telesales network in the 1990s. Many, if not most filmmakers would have had laughed at her success, but for Russell her achievement is as legitimate* and challenging as any other in life.

    Life, as it’s always described in his films, is messy* and complicated*. A hard-driving mother of two, Joy is in charge of a family that includes two men, her father Rudy (Robert De Niro) who runs a garage* and ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez), a Venezuelan* would-be Tom Jones-style singer, both of whom live in the basement of a modest home that also includes grandma Mimi (Diane Ladd), in whose eyes Joy can do no wrong, mother Terry (Virginia Madsen) who watches soap operas all the time, and sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm), who is always against Joy’s ideas.

    Joining the mix is an Italian woman Trudi (Isabella Rossellini), who becomes friends with Rudy.

    As the film flashes back* and jumps around in time, Joy is seen as a doer and creator who takes charge of every task if others fail to do it. Once Joy makes her homemade mop, a simple device made of a 300-foot cotton loop that’s easily wrung out without a watery mess, she decides to market it. Kicking her men out of the basement, she makes her prototype*, asks Trudi to invest*, hires a small army of Latinas to assemble* the product and begins her sales efforts by selling them in a Kmart parking lot, which doesn’t last long.

    Then, she tries to find QVC executive Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper), who explains how things work with them before asking Joy the question she couldn’t have dreamed of hearing, “Can you make 50,000 of these mops by next week?”

    Although this may seem like the end of the rainbow to Joy, it’s actually the dark side of the moon, as new troubles come up on the way to her success.(SD-Agencies)