Tia Nomore, left, and Erika Alexander in Earth Mama (A24)

Writer/director Savanah Leaf guides the viewer with ease and delicate care in her stunning debut. On paper, 24-year-old Gia (played with extraordinary naturalism by Tia Nomore) faces a grim situation: She is long into her pregnancy while working on her feet as an assistant in a mall portrait studio. Her two children are in foster care—of whom she has extremely limited, supervised visits. And she is barely able to get by—she swipes diapers from a bag on a playground, and the automated robotic voice on her pay-as-you-go cell phone warns of dwindling minutes.

With her friend Trina (Doechii), Gia attends a support group for expecting mothers led by the hardened yet empathetic social worker Miss Carmen (an excellent Erika Alexander). Given her difficult situation and the possibility of her baby ending up in foster care as well, Gia voices her desire to put up her baby for adoption, and her friendship fizzles, as Trina believes that Gia’s giving up her baby is going against God’s plan. But Gia doesn’t see any way out from her plight. She’s also fighting to regain more time with her kids. With Miss Carmen’s help, Gia finds a potential Black family who will take in her child.

It is in the interactions with this family, especially an early diner scene when they first meet, where the film garners a particularly complicated and deep emotional resonance. We see the weight of Gia’s decisions in her face, her nervousness and pain, and even glimpses of the former self she may have been and never was as the family’s teenaged daughter talks of playing basketball and going to college. The tension of what Gia will decide to do is just a sliver of the movie. Ultimately, Gia is in the suffocating and disorienting state of being a pregnant mother but feeling so separate and unable to fully care for herself and her two children.

Different from many realist dramas, Leaf’s film doesn’t delve far into how and why Gia ended up where she is—there are suggestions of past drug addiction, but there are no intricate dives into the past or old relationships. Instead, we are transported to the immediacy of Gia’s current situation and how, against setbacks and difficulties, she works through it.

Leaf’s aesthetics are unusual as well. The score of dulcet jazz notes by Kelsey Lu and the cool, hazy tones and colors (faded earth tones, purples, and pinks) in the cinematography by Jody Lee Lipes and the costumes of Natasha Hester elicit a deceptively mellow atmosphere. One of the recurring songs is Bettye Swann’s stirring “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye.” The lyrics (If you must go, baby, I won’t grieve) can be inferred in a myriad of ways—alluding to all of Gia’s painful, severed ties.

The aesthetics never feel too forced or calculated or lean into a heavily ironic stance, but are completely intrinsic to Gia’s world in the Bay Area. There are also surrealist gestures to folkloric dreams and visions Gia has of redwoods and of her umbilical cord (akin to the somewhat jarring flourishes in Nikyatu Jusu’s recent Nanny). The earthy Californian natural ambience is at odds with Gia’s existence—stuck in an old Toyota Camry in traffic jams, fluorescent-lit stores and state buildings, or in her apartment as loud music thumps on all sides of the walls.

At times, the film interjects the intimacy of Gia’s tale with testimonies from those within her orbit—some of the women from her counseling group or the brawny show-offs at her apartment complex who reveal their vulnerabilities through stories of their struggles in foster care. While deliberate, these aren’t trite diversions. They widen the scope of Leaf’s impressive, enveloping feature.