Review: Amy Adams plays a harried mom who unleashes her own liberation in ‘Nightbitch’

In its least manageable moments, early motherhood must feel like an unpaid job with no breaks, an inarticulate boss and working conditions designed to strip all that’s civil from one’s sense of self. Amy Adams’ harried, short-tempered suburban mom is, by all accounts, exactly the kind of attentive, loving and accommodating parent to her 2-year-old boy that society wants : there for the cooking, the cleaning and playtime; there for sleepless nights and tired days; there for guitar-accompanied book time at the library with moms who always seem more put-together; there to jump in when dad glides in from his business trips and shows cluelessness about child care. Adams’ unnamed character vocalizes a lot of them, but it’s better when we can feel them, as in the blackly amusing montages of parenting’s crushing sameness that play like long-overdue middle fingers to every movie or commercial that ever cut together sweetly homey moments into impossible utopias of Hallmark warmth. And Heller, a confidently empathetic director who can make an observant frame feel like a hug, wisely avoids traps like demonizing the child or setting up McNairy’s hapless dad simply to be a marital punchline.