Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a tour-de-force of bitterness, frustration and rage in the latest from British filmmaking legend Mike Leigh. Her character Pansy acts like a steamroller in even the most innocuous of situations, flattening her family as well as unsuspecting strangers, who are taken aback by her outbursts.

Pansy is a paranoid and depressed middle-aged woman ruling the roost in her sterile, obsessively cleaned home. David Webber and Tuwaine Barrett play Curtley and Moses, Pansy’s long-suffering, virtually mute husband and unemployed adult son, with Michele Austin her pleasant and upbeat hairdresser sister Chantelle. Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown feature as Chantelle’s personable daughters.

This is Leigh’s first film focusing primarily on London’s Black community and through his usual process of developing the script through improvisation with the cast his film convincingly captures its rich, distinct vernacular. At the same time, Hard Truths remains of a piece with Leigh’s previous domestic dramas like Secrets & Lies (for which Jean-Baptiste was Oscar-nominated), High Hopes et al, retaining that bittersweet air, faint theatricality and elevation of the humdrum.

Although often quite poignant, not least because Jean-Baptiste allows you to see behind the fury, Pansy’s rants and raves result in some truly priceless moments and she sometimes has a point (her thoughts on baby clothes, for example, are bang on). Meanwhile, an encounter in a car park with a fellow shouter (played by Gary Beadle) has a near sexual frisson.

There’s a lovely supporting turn from Austin as the saintly and sympathetic Chantelle and subtly effective work from Webber and Barrett as men who have all but disappeared. But Jean-Baptise eats the movie up with a performance that somehow manages to be as sincere as it is showstopping, giving us an unforgettable portrait of irrational, all-consuming anger. Funny, upsetting and true, it’s award-worthy stuff.

Hard Truths is in cinemas from Friday 31 January.