DaCosta is better at setting scenes than digging into them. She’s mapped out a realistic, coherent world, complete with casual race relations and everyday complications that get busier once Ollie and Deb reconcile. Deb opens the story further, as does her volcanic ex (James Badge Dale) and a threatening dealer (Luke Kirby). Each sister gets story time, but only Ollie’s consistently holds you, including during the tale’s quotidian lulls. Thompson’s soft, open face — which tenses into watchfulness that can border on panic — conveys much about Ollie, her decency and burdens. Thompson lets you see her character’s struggle, even when the movie simplifies its tough ethical questions.

If some of this sounds familiar it’s because “Little Woods” owes a debt to Debra Granik’s 2010 drama “Winter’s Bone,” which is a fine model. Each movie pivots on a young resilient woman on a journey (inner and outer) that takes her over occasionally forsaken locales while hauling heavy personal baggage, including needy relatives and drug-driven traumas. “Winter’s Bone” is often best remembered as Jennifer Lawrence’s breakthrough. But what resonates most strongly is Granik’s worldview. She has a feeling for hard people partly shaped by often-unforgiving circumstances, yet she never succumbs to meanness in her telling, an ethic that DaCosta also shares here.

Both “Little Woods” and “Winter’s Bone” exist on a continuum with other regional, independent movies about essentially alone women who navigate a world not altogether of their making, whether they’re scratching out a legal living or breaking the law. Part of what ties together these sometimes very different movies (like Victor Nunez’s “Ruby in Paradise” and Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River”) is that by complicating the idea of who gets to be the hero of the story, they also complicate the idea of female sovereignty. In “Little Woods,” men cling to the edges, sometimes viciously and impotently, yet without overwhelming the movie. They’re part of Ollie’s life, but they are also not its point.