Joy is a perfectly adequate film. Handsomely, if conventionally, shot under the direction of Ben Taylor, the film centers its point of view on nurse Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie). The script, written by the husband-and-wife team of Jack Thorne and Rachel Mason from a story by Emma Gordon and Shaun Topp, is deliberate and methodical. It drops the occasional rhetorical flourish but mostly sticks to the facts and lets the actors do their thing. It’s the kind of film that is accurate enough to be shown in class and interesting enough not to bore the students to death. But Joy doesn’t exist on its own. It wasn’t released in 2021 or in June. It’s hitting theatres in the UK and Ireland a week and a half after the American Presidential election and Netflix streaming stateside a week after that. It’s impossible to view the film without that in the back of one’s head. And in that context, Joy has a bruised, rebellious heart beating in its chest. It doesn’t provide catharsis, per se, but a perhaps heartening reminder of the previous struggles and triumphs.