When a comedy opens with seemingly endless shots of highway overpasses, followed by a woman crying in her car before the start of her work shift, it's definitely succeeded in setting a tone for the grounded humor that follows.

“Support the Girls” could look like a zany workplace sitcom pitch on paper, and it's not without its openly absurd moments, but what's compelling is how many of its own punchlines it deliberately mutes, making it a more effective and incisive take on the type of workplace it's portraying.

In this case, the workplace is the “Double Whammies” restaurant, a local-level Hooters knockoff. We never find out where the locale in question is, but part of the point of the film is that it doesn't matter.

It's the sort of hot-wings-and-brews sports bar you go to for its big-screen TVs, to watch whatever the day's game is, and for its crop-topped waitresses, and it's almost always just off the nearest interstate.

Regina Hall, who's spent much of her career as an under-utilized comedic actress, finally gets a chance to show off her range as Lisa, the on-site manager who doubles as a surrogate mom to her crew of drama-prone twenty-something serving gals, including deadpan single mom Danyelle (Shayna McHayle) and the relentlessly upbeat and affectionate Maci (Haley Lu Richardson).

Lisa's menu of trials and tribulations, on the day we catch up with her, includes coping with a botched robbery of the establishment, organizing a car wash fundraiser for an employee who's weathering a litigious break-up, dealing with rude customers, getting second-guessed by her temper tantrum-prone boss (James Le Gros) and being emotionally frozen out by her depressed husband (Lawrence Varnado).

Anyone who's ever worked in the food service industry will recognize many of the headaches that Lisa endures — even with seven years in the Navy, including two overseas shipboard deployments as part of the “War on Terror,” one of the hardest jobs I ever worked was at the Friendly's restaurant in Lawrence, Massachusetts — but “Support the Girls” also underscores the dichotomy of the Hooters-style business model in particular.

We constantly hear Lisa chide her employees to remember that Double Whammies is a “mainstream” and “family” establishment, but its main selling point is the very adult physical charms of its waitstaff, whom we see are trained and paid to feed into the customers' fantasies the attractive serving gals who seem to be flirting with them really do find their jokes to be just that funny.

The most hilarious aspect of Lisa's arguments with her boss over the scheduling of her waitresses' work shifts, with the unwritten “rainbow rule” being that two black women can't be serving customers on the same shift, is how mundane it is.

As with Lisa's subsequent conversation with a female executive for the competing “Mancave” national chain of sports restaurants, the sour joke is that these women's sexual appeal has been commercialized and corporatized, to the point that the companies that are doing this are able to avoid acknowledging it in so many words.

And Lisa knows how to play the game, but even as she faithfully describes this business model in the duly sanitized terms, with a fixed smile on her face, you can see her soul dying by degrees in her eyes.

The film closes out on as positive a note as it can — “There's always another (lousy) job,” as one of the characters says — but it is a draining experience, in a way that can only encourage solidarity with those who work these sorts of jobs.