We judge Mia, right from the start, because we’re invited to.

She’s very pregnant, pretty young and scrambling to get to her work, her classes and meeting her two children.

The classes are mandated by the state. There are drug tests to take. Her children are in foster care. And she’s late meeting them.

“I tried my best,” she says to her little boy, Tre. “This is not easy.”

Her daughter Shena isn’t speaking to her. Her child welfare case worker isn’t hearing it. Everything about Mia — starting with that instant-bad-impression neck tattoo, screams “impulsive” and “poor decisions.” We almost don’t need to learn that’s she’s a recovering addict.

“Earth Mama,” the debut feature of British born/Bay area filmmaker Savanah Leaf, is a “walk a mile in my shoes” drama of subdued emotions and intimate observations. She follows her heroine, played by rapper-turned-actress Tia Nomore, through the character Mia’s world — Oakland — struggling to keep a job, placate her religious, judgmental sister (Doechii), get her kids back from “the system” and bring her latest baby to term.

That sister isn’t dependable (I think she’s a sex worker, although that wasn’t made clear). There’s one friend, Mel (Keta Price) Mia can depend on. But with her mother and own family not in the picture, the baby daddies nowhere to be found, her support system is almost non-existent.

There’s one counselor’s she’s dealing with who might have be helpful. Miss Carmen (Erika Alexander) wants to help the single-mothers class of women who lost custody “get your kids back. But I can’t if you keep multiplying the household.”

It’s not just staying clean that will help her help them. She needs these women to stop having more babies while struggling with everything else life is throwing at them. And she’s the one who gently pushes Mia to giving up her unborn child for adoption.

“Earth Mama” is about Mia struggling with that decision, meeting prospective adoptive parents (Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Bokeem Woodine), keeping up with her classes and group counseling, hanging on to her portrait photography studio part time job and keeping appointments with the children she’s already brought into this world, kids who need “stability” more than anything else, the case workers and counselors insist.

Mia and we learn about the “anxiety” in addicts that “triggers” their need to use, and how job-one for every single one of these women is to “grow up.” That’s a big part of the solution to their lifetimes of bad decisions, even if it’s no guarantee they’ll earn an easier life by achieving that simple first goal.

Leaf intercuts snippets of “sharing” with the group moments, where women talk about their struggles and what keeps them going, adding authenticity to this fictional experience.

Nomore gives a documentary-real performance in the title role, showing us a flawed woman who is still young enough to blame others for her problems, and open to unhelpful suggestions about what “they” are doing when “they” take her children from her.

Leaf lays out the stresses facing Mia, but Nomore is the one who makes us feel them.

“I just don’t want to let anybody down” — her kids, her counselor, herself, her “family” and/or the people she can’t decide whether or not to give her baby to.

We never meet a baby daddy, and Mia declares she’s planning on living single from now on. Is this another rash decision, or a first step towards getting her adult footing?

That allows us to judge this “Earth Mama,” first encounter to last. But by the end, we’re a lot more sympathetic because this movie and this performance let us live in her shoes, just for a little while, and feel her burdens, grief, guilt and panic as we do.

Rating: R, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Tia Nomore, Erika Alexander, Keta Price, Doechii, Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Bokeem Woodbine.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Savanah Leaf. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:38