Tyler Perry built his reputation as a champion of Black womanhood. He’s told mostly women’s stories, showcased actresses both famous and obscure and spared no makeup or hairstyling expense for his shiny soap operas and low comedies with a message.

For many years, he went so far as to wear a dress to draw a crowd and help get across his comical melodramas’ points.

With “Straw,” he turns the great Taraji P. Henson loose and spends Netflix’s money on a melodramatic thriller about a woman beaten down by the worst that life, the system and Georgia has to offer.

It’s a pull-out-all-the-stops weeper, full of martrydom, coincidence, over-the-top cruelty, manipulation and plot contrivances. Say what you will about all that’s dumped on our heroine. She “snaps” a lot later than the average human being would at the sort of day she’s had.

Janiyah endures a noisy, dumpy no-AC apartment, noisy neighbors and an endlessly threatening landlady to keep a roof over her and her smart but medicated and fragile special-needs daughter’s heads. She works two jobs, drives a beater and still can’t keep up with the rent, her kids’ medicine or school lunch plan.

And the day we meet her, the straws finally pile up enough to snap the camel’s back.

She’s gotten an eviction notice. But it’s payday at the market where she works. She can cover the bill by 10. Then her daughter’s school calls — $40 in arrears on Aria’s lunch plan. Her boss (Glynn Turman) is in a fury. The school is wondering about the kid’s latest bruise — “She falls a lot.”

It’s raining, and she almost causes an accident. A road raging cop (Tilky Jones) crashes into her and sees to it that she’s blamed and loses her car.

“Make her suffer,” he tells a fellow officer.

Social Services takes her daughter. Her landlord tosses her belongings in the street and her boss fires her with extreme prejudice when she finally returns to work.

“Why are you DOING this?” she wails at every fresh assault, hardship or indignity. We know why. We can see it all unraveling and how it all looks. Janiyah knows, too.

“You don’t know me! You don’t care!”

Her “just get through this” day has gone off the rails. No more “go back to nursing school” dreams. No more chance of providing a better life for her daughter. The day’s cascading cluster of coincidences finish her off.

There’s a back room robbery just as she’s begging that abusive boss for her last check. She fights for the money she needs to just get through this day and a gun goes off.

We either can’t believe our eyes, or roll them right to the back of our heads as she staggers across the street to cash her bloodstained check. Because what would top every over-the-top-thing that happened before but a “bank robbery” and hostage situation that nobody is willing to believe “is all a big misunderstanding?”

Perry’s cooked up a “Falling Down” meets “John Q” mashup, with a whiff of “Dog Day Afternoon” in Janiyah’s single-day saga. Janiyah is trapped in a bank with cops itching for the chance to shoot her and only a half-sympathetic banker (Sherri Shepherd) and single-mom Det. Raymond (Teyana Taylor) willing to hear her out.

Maybe the world will hear her story when a hostage live-streams the stand-off. Or maybe not.

Perry manipulates our sympathies by having characters justify what’s happened and her role in it, as if that lets a woman with blood on her check and a gun she’s pointing at a clerk off.

The script piles on Janiyah to show how life has stacked its deck against her, and then Perry has to bend it, himself and that one cop’s motivations into a pretzel in trying to suggest a way out.

It’s no wonder Perry had to cheat through the ending, as recovering from this much hardship, injustice and cruelty logically is beyond resolution. “She snapped” isn’t righteous or a get-out-of-jail-free card, no matter how bad the day and the life before it have gone.

There’s a message movie here, one that rips “nobody wants to work for anything” and “she made bad choices” judgements, that showcases what a struggle race-based-poverty is and builds sympathy for anyone who has to endure even a fraction of this in their daily life.

Perry’s problem wasn’t in “seeing” this and sympathizing with people like Janiyah. It was piling it all on one person in one day, letting her snap and then blundering his way to a cop-out of a finale.

Perry doesn’t put his finger on the scales on Janiya’s behalf. He balls up his fist and pounds them until they break.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Sherri Shepherd, Teyana Taylor, Mike Merrill, Glynn Turman, Tilky Jones and Sinbad

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tyler Perry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47