By Betsy Sherman

Tracie Laymon’s comic drama about the serendipitous connection between a 25-year-old woman whose sense of self is fraying and a man stymied by loss is both entertaining and profound.

Bob Trevino Likes It, directed and written by Tracie Laymon. Playing at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Landmark Kendall Square, AMC Boston Common 19 and suburbs.

Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo in a scene from Bob Trevino Likes It.

If you’re someone who stays through a movie’s end credits, you may have noticed they wind up with the name of the company created for that movie. Sometimes the name is funny or ironic. The LLC created for Bob Trevino Likes It is right on the nose: Chosen Family. The notion is embraced by the film and celebrated as providing a new lease on life. For her impressive feature debut, writer-director Tracie Laymon built on her real-life experience of finding a surrogate father figure in a stranger she met online.

Laymon’s comic drama about the serendipitous connection between a 25-year-old woman whose sense of self is fraying and a man stymied by loss is both entertaining and profound. It shows the filmmaker to be a fine director of actors; she guides star Barbie Ferreira through a wow of a performance and gives comic legend and Latino activist John Leguizamo an uncharacteristic role — that of a Midwestern working stiff — in which he’s credible and affecting.

Set in Louisville, Kentucky, the movie catches Lily Trevino (Ferreira) at a moment in which she’s being disrespected by her ex-boyfriend (via texts) and taken for granted by her jerk of a father, Robert Trevino (French Stewart). Over a restaurant lunch, Dad is so engrossed in a dating app that he doesn’t even listen to Lily. He announces that he’s hoping to score with a lady from his senior community and convinces his daughter to come along on their date to talk him up (then he stiffs Lily on the lunch tab). The date doesn’t go well, and Robert’s over-the-top reaction is to berate and disown Lily.

Lily, who has always been eager to help others, has entered the caregiving profession. She’s the live-in aide to Daphne (Lauren “Lolo” Spencer), a disabled young woman who uses a wheelchair. Growing up, Lily experienced considerable adversity: her drug-addicted mother left the family when Lily was four, and her father treats her like a burden. Lily goes through life apologizing for herself. An early scene mentions the concept of self-abandonment, which comes to resonate later on.

Seeking to calm the waters with Dad, who won’t take her calls or let her visit, Lily thinks there might be a way to connect on social media. She makes a friend request to a Bob Trevino (Leguizamo), who becomes the Bob of the title, a friendly guy who likes her posts. They discuss their respective Trevino families and get to know each other (the suspicion of anything untoward going on is quickly dismissed).

This Bob Trevino is an Indiana resident who’s around Lily’s father’s age; he and his mother emigrated from Mexico when he was a child. He’s the conscientious manager of a construction company, who overworks not so much because he loves the job but to have somewhere to go (when introduced, he’s alone at the office on a Saturday, swigging Pepto-Bismol). He and his wife Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones) are sweet to each other, but their lives don’t seem to overlap much anymore. Bob tells Jeanie about his new social media friend; Lily explains catfishing to him, but he insists his correspondent is just a “kid who never caught a break.”

A household emergency prompts Lily to ask Bob to come to the rescue. That way, when they meet, Bob fulfills the role of a fix-it-Dad figure, complete with a trip to the hardware store to buy Lily a set of tools. Across subsequent get-togethers, misunderstandings arise. Lily’s family dynamic has conditioned her to panic and flee conflict; Bob teaches her that a better alternative is to talk things out and work them through. Finally, a mature person!

Bob and Jeanie lost a child in infancy several years earlier, and the grief has hung over them ever since. Jeanie discovered scrapbooking — preserving the physical past securely between two covers — as a means of comfort as well as creativity. Bob accepts how that has worked for her but feels that’s not enough. His passion is astronomy, and he looks to the cosmos to find meaning. He takes Lily along to a rural property he and Jeanie own to watch a meteor shower. It’s the perfect setting for heart-to-heart talk and a deepening of their friendship.

The events that follow include Lily’s Dad proving how low he can go in order to undermine her. Daphne comes to the fore, with her inspired idea that Lily’s path to removing obstacles to self-love includes a trip to the local Rage Room, where folks can don protective gear and smash things up real good.

While the movie does a nice job moving among tones, not every step is sure-footed. For example, a scene involving basketball, well, deflates. One scene that works so beautifully that you’d better come stocked with tissues takes place at an animal rescue. The cathartic act of holding a puppy opens dimensions on what might have been in Lily’s life, and in Bob’s (the emotion hits him when he’s alone in his car).

The energetic Ferreira lets her character’s wide range of moods play across her face, from sensitivity and concentration when Lily is writing poetry, to alarming excitement when she’s carried away to the point of delusion. The actress has great support. I’ve got new respect for French Stewart — he succeeds at being both despicable and hilarious without being cartoonish. You’ll be torn between wanting this toxic mess out of Lily’s life and craving Stewart back on the screen. As Daphne, Spencer (who was great in her debut, Give Me Liberty) projects grounded confidence.

Jones and Leguizamo, who previously co-starred in the Leguizamo-directed Critical Thinking, have an easy rapport, and the device of snapshots for the scrapbooks gives them a believable past. She endows Jeanie with warmth, and also an elusive quality. Leguizamo, who’s done so much to rave about in his decades as an actor-writer-director in film and TV and on stage, has lately raised consciousness about the history we didn’t fully learn at school by creating Latin History for Morons and the PBS documentary series American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos. He’s got a touch of roguish charm, whether he’s playing comedy or drama, but that quality is tamped down in this movie. In displaying Bob’s quiet empathy and integrity, Leguizamo adds emotional colors to his palette. There are laughs, too, as Bob taps into his latent Dad-ness. Yeah, he might tell those notorious dumb jokes, but with Leguizamo playing him, I don’t buy that Bob would be that bad a dancer.

Betsy Sherman has written about movies, old and new, for the Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, and Improper Bostonian, among others. She holds a degree in archives management from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. When she grows up, she wants to be Barbara Stanwyck.