“I have an unquiet mind,” Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) pleads in one of the many letters she frequently exchanges with her beloved sister back home in their native Bangladesh. Based upon Monica Ali’s well-received 2003 debut novel, “Brick Lane” nimbly skirts the fringes of female-empowerment cliché as Nazneen’s mind finds both quiet and cacophony in a series of difficult and defining choices.

Firmly anchored to the present via an increasingly strained 16-year arranged marriage and the evolving daily domestic crises of raising two England-born daughters in a council flat on London’s titular immigrant-heavy road, Nazneen’s mind and heart long to be anywhere but in the here and now. Her husband, Chanu (Satish Kaushik), is an unapologetically overbearing, corpulent boob. Up for a promotion at his job, a deluded Chanu explains to his wife and daughters that his familiarity with the works of Thackeray and Chaucer make his office advancement a virtual lock. When her husband’s literary pretensions fail to keep him employed, Nazneen is forced to accept a neighbor’s charity and take some sewing work. Her sole job perk is the gentle and increasingly provocative attentions of her employers’ nephew, Karim (Christopher Simpson). Young, handsome, lean, and unfailingly committed to bettering Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi immigrant community, Karim is the polar opposite of Nazneen’s awkwardly assimilated, culturally colonized, and narcissistic spouse.

Jokes yield to verbal intimacy, touches yield to caresses, and before long Nazneen and Karim become lovers. “You’re the real fing,” Karim says to her in heavily cockney-accented English after one adulterous coupling. But Nazneen isn’t sure what she is. In pulsing flashbacks, her unquiet mind reconciles bleak, rusty, racially charged London circa 2001 with the dew-moistened greenery of her South Asia childhood. “If Allah meant for us to ask questions,” scolds Nazneen’s own doomed mother in a flashback that demonstrates the brevity of the time mother and daughter got to share in Bangladesh, “he would have made us men.” But as faith yields to sin, and marriage and motherhood are temporarily eclipsed by desire, questions are all it seems Nazneen has to work with.

Shooting in wide-screen format, director Sarah Gavron does an estimable job of finding and fomenting visual schemes that help to physically distinguish and emotionally unify the Nazneen of then and the Nazneen of now. The director deploys CinemaScope’s low-ceiling frame particularly well within the cramped confines of the unhappy couple’s tenement flat. The film’s co-adaptors, the Australian screenwriter Laura Jones and the British playwright Abi Morgan, have trimmed the source novel’s myriad subplots and epiphanies into a piece of narrative topiary often more reminiscent of melodrama than the real life they clearly seek to romance. While story digressions such as Chanu’s foolhardy moneymaking schemes, the burdensome memory of the couple’s first child’s death in infancy, and an awkwardly realized disclosure about the true cost of Nazneen’s sisters’ amorous adventures back home, don’t entirely stop the show, they do slow it down.

Nevertheless, when “Brick Lane” resumes a narrative path leading to its principal character’s maturation and emotional emancipation, it becomes a film of abundant and engaging good will. Nazneen’s eldest daughter, Shahana (Naeema Begum), begins the film as a creature of such knee-jerk teenage embarrassment at her father’s pomposity that she appears close to spraining her head with each exaggerated eye roll. Yet by film’s end, Shahana has become her mother’s alter ego, and their evolving relationship dramatizes with subtle complexity the mutually altering bonds connecting parent to child. Though set up with almost bathetic uncouthness, Chanu also receives a satisfyingly graceful pass by film’s end.

The real ace in the hole in “Brick Lane” is Ms. Chatterjee. On the screen or the soundtrack in nearly every scene, the actress navigates the occasionally strident and heavy-handed nature of “Brick Lane” with an alternately serene and anxious radiance that spreads into every shadowed corner in the present and nostalgically saturated landscape in the past.