Let’s be clear: Idiotka is not going to win any awards in the technical categories. It’s as homemade a production as they come, a film with such indie roots it felt like I was transported from my living room to the trendy arthouse cinema I spent many college nights at. This is the kind of movie that used to get distributed on long-gone labels like FineLine, October Films, and Gramercy Pictures. Held together by double-sided tape and a prayer, what this cutesy comedy lacks in budget it more than makes up for in scrappy spirit.

Writer-director Nastasya Popov’s debut follows Margarita (Anna Baryshnikov, Love Lies Bleeding), a struggling fashion designer living in her Russian family’s crowded West Hollywood apartment. When she enters a Project Runway-style reality competition to win $100,000 and save her grandmother’s place, slick producer Nicol (Camila Mendes, Música) pushes her to exploit her family’s hardship for better TV. The premise is simple, maybe too simple, and gets stretched thin before the 82-minute runtime wraps up.

The film’s secret weapon is Galina Jovovich as Gita, Margarita’s vivacious grandmother. Milla Jovovich‘s mother (a celebrated actress in the Soviet Union before coming to Los Angeles in the 1980s) almost walks away with the whole movie through sheer presence alone. There’s enough positive energy radiating off her to fuel the entire extended family, and when she’s on screen, you forget you’re watching something assembled on a shoestring budget. Mark Ivanir (Emilia Pérez) as Margarita’s father provides solid dramatic grounding, a man still embarrassed after losing his medical practice and serving time for healthcare fraud.

Baryshnikov is a charming lead, though she’s stuck with some dialogue as wooden as Pinocchio’s kneecaps. However, the family dynamics are where the film finds its footing. When it shifts to the reality show competition, things get oh so cringey from acting, directing, and general filmmaking perspectives. Owen Thiele (Theater Camp) as the host goes a bit too over the top, as do the judges played by Benito Skinner, Saweetie, and Julia Fox (Presence). All four are capable of much better; Thiele and Skinner are terrific together in Overcompensating, and Fox has been picking up tiny roles in Hollywood films that she spices up nicely. Here, nobody quite finds the right balance between satire and sincerity.

To her credit, Popov wrangles a lot of pieces to produce a cohesive film, even if it looks rough. She shot partly in her own grandmother’s apartment and scraped locations together through friends of friends of friends. Though set in West Hollywood, there’s a raw New York hipness to the endeavor that gives it credibility. Cinematographer Kristen Correll (My Old Ass) does what she can with limited resources and sets that are fairly unforgiving with light and angles. Costume designers Natasha Simchowitz and Sophie Kay deserve recognition for outfitting Margarita in patchwork dresses that reflect everything bursting inside her.

If you can put aside the subpar filmmaking and focus on Popov’s screenplay co-written with Tess Cohen, you’ll see the value being highlighted. Like its central character, Idiotka has a go-getter energy that carries it across the finish line with a flourish. It’s not going to stick in your brain long after you’ve finished it, but it will poke around at your heart in places where you might feel its lingering touch enough to mention it to your friends.