Regina Hall in Support the Girls (Magnolia Pictures)

“This is a family restaurant,” proudly announces Lisa (endearing Regina Hall), the daytime manager at Double Whammies, a Hooters-style exurban watering hole where a mostly male clientele laps up beer, breasts, and big-screen TV. Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls starts off promisingly, satirizing the way U.S. businesses manage to sell and sanitize sleaze at the same time. It shares something with cult favorite Office Space in exposing the emotional lives of the “little people” behind the scenes in absurd, contemporary workplaces, but in striving for good-heartedness, the film’s too resolutely tame to have much of a bite.

Lisa is having a rotten day. A burglar is trapped in the restaurant’s ceiling vent, her relationship is falling apart, the cable TV is on the fritz hours before a marquee boxing match, and her boss (James Le Gros) is on her case. She also has to rein in some of the more eager waitresses from letting customers get too handsy. As the movie likes to tell us in dialogue and exposition over and over, the waitstaff functions like a supportive family: sharing affection, giving into exasperation, and watching each other’s backs. Today, though, the den mother’s just about had it, and decisions are going to be made that affect the whole crew.

Hall is a lovely, wise presence who holds up the bulk of the movie, but the script gives her character a resigned, commonsensical approach to all the curveballs thrown her way, to the point that we want to see something more.  Bujalski has taken what is a presumably coarse, fast-moving environment and slowed it down to gentle (sometimes clunky) indie rhythms. Satire runs soft and benign. The ensemble piece has a few comic feints that come as a bracing surprise, but it needs more of these and a little snap, crackle, and pop to keep it moving.

Quirky secondary characters and understated moments between Hall and the other actors give the movie some detail and vitality, such as her interactions with Haley Lu Richardson, as one of the younger waitresses, and a tougher, more restless customer. It feels ungenerous to criticize a movie with its heart so firmly in the right place, yet Support the Girls could use a double shot of something brazen—maybe less wistful empathy and more beer and boobs.