As Joey Lauren Adams’s film “Come Early Morning” opens, it appears that Lucy (Ashely Judd) is on track to live, love, work, and die all within a few miles of the Arkansas town in which she was born. Well, maybe not love. A building contractor by day and an aging party girl by night, Lucy’s emotional life is loosely defined by an unending string of empty one-night stands, balanced with the chaste attentions of a series of father-figure stand-ins like her boss (Stacey Keach) and her uncle (Tim Blake Nelson), and a problematic relationship with her actual dad.

Lucy’s father, Lowell, played by Scott Wilson in a near repeat of his shambling, somnambulistic southern papa role in Phil Morrison’s recent “Junebug,” is so emotionally unavailable he will barely even answer the door when his daughter comes a knockin’. Daddy’s little girl can’t really be blamed for inheriting some of that remoteness. Lucy’s social life is a treadmill of road house pick-ups and longneck bottle-strewn motel room mornings after. She preserves her self-esteem by insisting on paying for the room and by keeping her work, her home, and her straight-laced roommate.

But Cal (Jeffrey Donovan), one of Lucy’s bar conquests, is not only amorous and available, he’s persistent. Using a combination of toothy charm and macho bull-headedness, Cal refuses to take Lucy’s usual “You’re sweet and last night was fun and all, but …” for an answer. To Cal, Lucy looks like a keeper. The only thing that Lucy’s ever kept is at least an arm’s length from any paramour who might require her commitment. As Lucy closes in on dad and Cal closes in on Lucy, “Come Every Morning” heads for a multiple character emotional pileup that will potentially leave a trail of half-lived, half-loved lives backed all the way up to the interstate.

All this is pretty standard story grist in the American low-budget post-Sundance movie mill. Film festival schedules and thesis project screenings are full of movies that, like “Come Early Morning,” percolate along on slight circumstantial conflicts spiced with self-reflection, self-denial, and self-definition. It’s personal filmmaking — the leads’ drive to know and express themselves and to break out of a circumstantial tar pit seem to parallel similar needs on the parts of their creators.

A film student friend of mine has dubbed movies of this kind “Auteurist Identity Issue Dramas,” a tongue-in-cheek sub-genre of independent and student films to which “Come Early Morning” certainly belongs. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it is also the most promising low-budget American directing debut I’ve seen since Craig Brewer’s similar Auteurist Identity Issue Drama “Hustle & Flow.” Despite its occasional shortcomings in craft, script, and scope, “Come Early Morning” is lithe and engrossing character-centered storytelling. It is clearly a labor of love for all concerned and, unlike the majority of American films of similarly low budgets and sincere ambitions, you don’t need to have worked on the film to experience that abundant compassionate creative spirit behind it.

Like Mr. Brewer’s picture,”Come Early Morning” owes a strong debt to 1970s American movie visual tropes. Photographed by the marvelous cinematographer Tim Orr, who has contributed yeoman work to David Gordon Green’s similarly retro-look films, “Come Early Morning” evokes the bleached-out earth tones of John Frankenheimer’s “I Walk the Line” and Daryl Duke’s “Payday.” In her debut as a writer and director, Ms. Adams (again, like Mr. Brewer) demonstrates an unusually strong acumen for unobtrusive, emotionally motivated camera movement. It should be noted that it took Kevin Smith, the director of the film for which Ms. Adams is best known as an actress (“Chasing Amy”), at least three movies to discover the reaction shot, an element of film style that Ms. Adams has down pat in her first try.

Her script for the most part avoids southern fried clichés. “Old Jimmy had a hard tongue,” Lucy says, recalling the misspent youth that led her into a misspent adulthood. Somewhere between Ms. Adams’s words and Ms. Judd’s easy smile, you know what that first kiss was like and you feel the broken promise of a clumsy teenage boy’s fumblings and a troubled teenage girl’s burgeoning appetite for more sensation and less intimacy.

After successfully enlivening turgid dreck like “Double Jeopardy” and “De-Lovely” with her no BS acting chops, the honest and three-dimensional characterizations of “Come Early Morning” must have seemed like a lob for Ms. Judd. Her performance never suggests a self-congratulatory wallow in Lucy’s moral blindspots, weaknesses, and poor choices. She doesn’t waste time judging Lucy any more than Lucy spends her screen life apologizing for who she is or declaring who she may or may not become by the film’s end.

None of this would mean anything if the supporting cast weren’t able to flesh out the rest of the tapestry. For the most part they succeed admirably. As Cal, Mr. Donovan effortlessly embodies an unselfconscious blend of courtly southern male patience and Trans-Am-driving macho arrogance. Alternating goofy, aw-shucks grins with petulant jock pouts, Mr. Donovan’s performance hints at a young, freshly laundered Warren Oates.

Laura Prepon all but vanishes into her role as Lucy’s easygoing roommate, and both Messrs. Keach and Nelson allow their characters to draw complete breaths. And though Diane Ladd in the role of Lucy’s aunt occasionally threatens to boil over into blue-collar histrionics, for the most part she stays on target.

“Come Early Morning” is far from a perfect film. Especially in its last hour, the movie hangs sudden, almost arbitrary significance on random events and winds up feeling a bit like a two-act serving of plot spooned out on a three-act sized bun. There is also a sometimes off-putting emphasis on selling story moments with TV-style tight close-ups.

But as the credits roll to the tune of Nashville songwriting warhorse Billy Joe Shaver’s “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal,” I was glad I’d hung in and stayed the course. Mr. Shaver reinvigorates country tunesmith clichés through wit, personality, and passion. Ms. Adams uses honesty, visual smarts and a generously tended-to cast to give the oft-familiar refrains of “Come Early Morning” a welcome strength, sweetness, swagger, and bite.