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Spanish-born filmmaker Antonio Méndez Esparza’s second feature, “Life and Nothing More,” is a sensitive portrait of an African-American working class family struggling on the margins of society. In a tense climate teeming with fiery debates over authorship in race and representation in film and TV, it’s hard to ignore that the movie has been made by an outsider. But Esparza knows this space well: His first feature, “Aquí y allá,” captured a working class* Mexican family in Mexico. He has embraced the challenge on both occasions.

“I’m always questioning my own subjectivity, my own perspective,” he said. “If you look at both of the films I’ve made, I only focus on what I see, which I admit could render me blind to certain things, but, as an outsider, that was my only solution. I have to approach each world like I am a total stranger to it,...

Some movies obsess about saving the world — from natural disasters, supervillains, and other things that might destroy us all. In its own modest but no-less-ambitious way, Antonio Méndez Esparza’s “Life and Nothing More” narrows that concern to a single individual, detailing what it would take to rescue a 14-year-old boy from being swallowed up by the system, incarcerated and forgotten by lawmakers and enforcers who think in terms of figures, rather than individuals. Set in and around Tallahassee — the corner of Florida where the crime rate is highest, and where juveniles from single-parent homes are so easily derailed from fulfilling their potential — this no-frills portrait of teenage Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) and his minimum-wage mom Regina (Regina Washington) is one the year’s most essential films.

At least, it would be if audiences could be compelled to seek out this understated indie masterwork amid all the bigger-budget, more attention-grabbing competition.

Regina (Regina Williams), a black North Florida waitress living somewhere below the poverty line, snaps at her 14-year-old son, Andrew (Andrew Bleechington), after he’s been arrested for at least the second time: “This is your life you’re fucking up, not mine!” It’s one of the only lies that she tells in Antonio Méndez Esparza’s “Life and Nothing More,” an elliptical and documentary-like drama that’s endowed with sober honesty in almost every scene.

For better or worse, Regina’s hardscrabble existence is inextricably intertwined with that of her teenage child, and that of the kid’s incarcerated father, and — to a certain extent — even that of a new love interest named Robert (Robert Williams), an unambiguously interested stranger who first hits on Regina while she’s at work. She’s the nucleus of an unstable cell in a hostile body, forced to manage her own problems...

If, per Thoreau, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, what do the mass of women lead? To watch single mom Regina (Regina Williams), the central figure in Antonio Méndez Esparza’s dramatic feature “Life and Nothing More,” as she struggles to raise a three-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son, the notion of quiet desperation might seem like a luxury. Contemplative brooding doesn’t keep you on your feet at a minimum-wage diner job, or put food on the table, or keep a teenager from worrisome choices with life-altering consequences.

It’s the steady drip of sustaining oneself and one’s loved ones, in a world in which your problems are invisible to nearly everyone else, that undergirds Esparza’s attentive, unvarnished work of modern neorealism, his second such effort in this realm after his 2012 debut about Mexican migrant workers, “Aquí y Allá.”

As with that film, Esparza uses...

Many filmmakers find the need to politicize truths without realizing or believing their existence has already politicized them. There’s power in this sort of manipulation because the product created is working towards opening eyes or (in most cases) reinforcing what those eyes accepted long ago. That power can also be warped to the other side, however, as detractors will claim the politicization is proof there’s nothing to “really” worry about. They’ll say the artist drew his/her narrative with partisan intent and work towards disputing its message to their own followers on those terms — politicizing the politicization until we find ourselves with an insurmountable chasm between echo chambers populated by folks who’ve forgotten how to debate or argue beyond screaming their opinions without any evidence to back them up.

This is America today: a place inundated with so much information that we’ve decided to replace...