It's a very harrowing portrait... Zain Al Rafeea is amazing.

It's essential viewing for the ways in which it illuminates brutally hard lives many of us could otherwise not imagine, and for the craft of its nonprofessional performers.

Jail and courtroom scenes, at the beginning and end, may be a tad implausible, not to mention scrappy. But the middle section, mostly shot on handheld cameras on the streets of Beirut, is breathtaking, topical, hilarious, tender and brutal.

It hammers and hammers towards making a point by giving us a tour of explicit pain and struggle without any subtlety.