From left: Maïwenn, Arnaud Henriet, JoeyStarr, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Jérémie Elkaïm, Emmanuelle Bercot, Karole Rocher, Naidra Ayadi. (Sundance Selects)

A six-year-old girl has a father who loves her too much. A baby is abducted by a drug addicted mother. A thirteen-year-old performs sexual favors in exchange for a smartphone. These are heartbreaking stories of abuse—but what if it was your job to listen to them? Director Maïwenn’s disturbing crime drama Polisse looks at children in trouble and the men and women in charge of protecting them.

Polisse depicts various threads in the lives and work of the Child Protection Unit of the Paris police. The difficulty of the work is obvious from the first scene of a little girl describing abuses to an officer. From that rough start, the movie never gets any easier, but it also doesn’t let you turn away. And unlike, say, the recent prostitution expose Elles, you never feel Maïwenn is exploiting her vulnerable charges.

The film is populated by a strong ensemble cast who mostly keep it real. Along with the troubled children they’re called to help, we see the often heated interactions, both professional and personal, among members of the CPU. Separated by race and gender, they seem to fight each other and make love to each other in equal parts, in predictably complicated French relationships.

Two emerge at the film’s moral center. Hot-headed Fred is played by JoeyStarr, the stage name for Didier Morville. JoeyStarr began his career as a French rapper, which may not sound promising, but his performance ranges from seething to tender without launching into the histrionics to which a few of his cast members fall prey.

Karin Viard and Marina Fois. (Sundance Selects)

I’m more conflicted about the other actor at the center of Polisse: the director. Actress-turned-director Maïwenn Le Besco now goes by her first name, and her role in the film is deliberately self-conscious. This makes the third feature she has directed in which she also stars as a camera-wielding character. You may suspect the director of repeating herself. But she gets such good performances out of a huge cast that one can forgive the navel-gazing, and in a movie about a police force with management issues, she is clearly an effective manager on set. Here she plays Melissa, a photojournalist who embeds herself in more ways than one with the crew, keeping her hair in a bun and wearing fake glasses so she’s taken more seriously with her Leica DSLR. My guess is she carries a camera in her next movie too.

Polisse weaves race and class politics into its dense tapestry, following its ensemble actors as they meet yet another crisis. It comes off like the two-hour pilot for a must-see French cop show. The characters and situations it introduces are compelling and often harrowing, and though you spend a lot of intense time with these people, you want to see where they‘ll go next.

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Polisse
Directed by Maïwenn.
Written by Maïwenn and Emmanuelle Bercot.
With Karin Viard, JoeyStar, Marina Foïs, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Maïwenn, and dozens of other Frenchpeople.
Running time: 127 Minutes.
Not rated. Contains strong and often disturbing sexual content, profanity, drug use, violence.
Opens today at E Street.