What “Troop Zero” lacks in complexity, it makes up for in heart. This straightforward dramedy, which is Amazon’s first foray into the streaming-only movie space, follows Christmas Flint (Mckenna Grace), an eccentric girl growing up in rural Georgia. It’s 1977, Jimmy Carter is president and Christmas is determined to make contact with aliens by recording a message on NASA’s Golden Record, a time-capsule of sounds and images launched into space and intended for extraterrestrial life.

All Christmas has to do is win the statewide Birdie Scout talent competition. But after the local troop rejects her for being a social outcast, she recruits the town’s other misfits and starts her own group. There’s Joseph (Charlie Shotwell), her best friend whose interest in fashion and disinterest in athletics gets him the moniker “boy-girl”; Hell-No Price (Milan Ray), her former bully; Smash (Johanna Colón), a relatively mute child who communicates by destroying objects; and Anne-Claire (Bella Higginbotham), a shy evangelical. Christmas also recruits Miss Rayleen (Viola Davis), the woman who works at her father’s unsuccessful law firm, to be the troop mother.