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Claireece Jones, the Harlem teenager at the center of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, lives in a world of specific and overwhelming horror. She goes by her middle name, Precious, which seems like a cruel taunt, since nearly everyone around her thinks shes worthless and lets her know it. Precious mother, Mary, played with operatic fervor by the comedian MoNique, dispenses a daily ration of humiliation and abuse. The constant verbal and physical violence she directs at her daughter would be shocking even without the monstrous crime that hangs over their dim, dirty apartment like a cloud. Precious, overweight and illiterate — and played by an extraordinarily poised first-time actress named Gabourey Sidibe — has a young daughter and is pregnant for a second time. The father in both cases, who is nowhere to be seen, is Preciouss father too. This information is bluntly presented at the beginning of Sapphires 1996 novel, a first-person narrative composed in rough, stylized dialect. In Lee Danielss risky, remarkable film adaptation, written by Geoffrey Fletcher, the facts of Preciouss life are also laid out with unsparing force (though not in overly graphic detail). But just as Push achieves an eloquence that makes it far more than a fictional diary of extreme dysfunction, so too does Precious avoid the traps of well-meaning, preachy lower-depths realism. It howls and stammers, but it also sings. Mr. Daniels, directing his second feature (after the vivid and eccentric Shadowboxer), is not afraid to mix styles and genres. In his determination to do justice to Claireeces inner life, as well as to her circumstances, he allows splashes of fantasy, daubs of humor and floods of unabashed melodrama into the drab landscape of her struggle. Ugliness is all around her, but beauty is there too. There is something almost reckless about this filmmakers eclecticism, which extends from the casting — pop stars and television personalities alongside trained and untrained actors — to the visual textures and the soundtrack music. Precious is a hybrid, a mash-up that might have been ungainly, but that manages to be graceful instead. Its partly a bootstrap drama of resilience and redemption, complete with a hardworking teacher (Paula Patton) wrangling a classroom full of disadvantaged girls. Its also the nearly Gothic story of a child tormented by the cruelty of adults, as lurid as a Victorian potboiler or a modern-day tell-all memoir. Above all Precious is unabashedly populist in its potent emotional appeal — not for nothing did Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey sign on as executive producers around the time of the films debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January — and at the same time determined to challenge its audiences complacency as only a genuine work of art can. Mary, brimming with rage, thwarted love and plain meanness, is a character bound to provoke discomfort. Even otherwise misogynistic hip-hop artists will pay tribute to the heroism of African-American mothers, and to see that piety so thoroughly dispensed with is downright shocking. Other provocations are more subtle but no less pointed. There are virtually no men in this movie. Preciouss father is glimpsed briefly in flashbacks of his assaults on her, and in the fantasy sequences that provide escape from her pain Precious hobnobs with handsome boys, but otherwise the only male character of significance is a hospital worker played by Lenny Kravitz. Otherwise, Preciouss cosmos, for better and for worse, is a universe of women: the social worker (Mariah Carey, scrubbed of any vestige of divahood); the teacher, Ms. Rain; her co-worker in the remedial education program, played by the comedian and talk show host Sherri Shepherd; and Preciouss fellow students. These characters all can be seen as surrogate mothers, aunts and sisters, who together provide Precious with a more functional family (to say the least) than what she has at home. But their love is also enabled by institutions and government policies. An unstated but self-evident moral of Precious, set during Ronald Reagans presidency and based on a book published in the year of Bill Clintons welfare reform, is that government can provide not only a safety net, but also, in small and consequential ways, a lifeline. PRECIOUS Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire Opens on Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago http://www.blacktree.tv