Overture Films

Amy Adams (left) and Emily Blunt star in "Sunshine Cleaning."

Despite some obvious similarities, such as the title and Alan Arkin as a wacky grandpa, "Sunshine Cleaning" is not this year's "Little Miss Sunshine." It's more akin to Charlie Huston's new novel "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death."

Huston's book is about a man with a tragedy in his past who finds a way to deal with his troubled life when he takes a job as a cleaner of crime scenes.

"Sunshine Cleaning" is about two sisters with a tragedy in their past who find a way to deal with their troubled lives when they form a cleanup crew for crime scenes.

This is a quirkily charming comedy-drama with more emphasis on the drama. In the first five minutes, a man tucks a shotgun shell in his pocket, walks into a sporting goods store and asks to see a shotgun. You know exactly what he's going to do.

Amy Adams plays Rose, the older sister, who sees her life unraveling around her. She works for a maid service, sleeps with her married high-school boyfriend and tries to stay ahead of her precocious and trouble-prone grade school son, Oscar. When Rose runs out of public school options for Oscar, she realizes that her maid's salary won't cover a private school's tuition.

Emily Blunt plays Norah, Rose's edgy sister, and she's just been fired from a waitressing job. Meanwhile, Grandpa Joe is still searching for that pot of gold through failed schemes.

Rose learns from her married cop boyfriend that cleaning up at the scenes of messy deaths can be a lucrative enterprise. Armed with nothing but brushes and some spray cleaner, the sisters jump into the business. They quickly learn about regulations and the tools they need to do the job and they start to take satisfaction in turning the scenes of anger and heartbreak into a semblance of normalcy.

Director Christine Jeffs and writer Megan Holley give the movie a real sense of people on the ropes. Despite their failure to fill in some troublesome blanks, they capture the cadences and messiness of real life. Plus, they have a fine cast to work with.

Adams gives Rose a self-deprecating wit along with a sense of desperation and a survivor's instinct. She's a single mother, a former high school cheerleader in a dead-end job who wants to hold her head up in the company of her successfully married and financially comfortable friends. Cleaning up the bio-hazards of places where death occurs gives Rose her first sense of accomplishment since her cheerleading days.

If Adams is the heart of the movie, Blunt is its soul. Tattooed and gothed-out, she bears deep wounds and wears her failures like badges of merit. Blunt gives Norah a bracing sense of rebellious mischief driven by the sorrows of her past. She's angry at the world but the only person she wants to beat up is herself.

Arkin is Arkin, a doting gramps with a talent for pontificating and passing off aberrant thinking as wisdom. The filmmakers don't give him much back story to explain why he can own a house despite his hairbrained schemes and what his life was like when his daughters were trying to cope with a family trauma. But, hey, he's fun and he's Alan Arkin on cruise control.