Flex, which opened Thursday at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse venue, announces the arrival of a singular new talent on the American theater scene: Candrice Jones. In her second full-length play, this young playwright from Dermott, Arkansas, offers a stark but affectionate portrait of five Black teenage girls from the rural South and their struggle to forge a path for themselves, ideally far from their socially restrictive and economically challenged homes.

For Starra Jones (Erica Matthews) and her peers, the best hope appears to be basketball and the promise of a college scholarship that might lift them out of the fictional Plainnole, Arkansas circa 1997. Her chief on-court rival is April (Brittany Bellizeare), a California transplant already receiving attention from college scouts. But Starra also bristles when Sidney (Tamera Tomakili) breaks the squad’s no-sex pact and gets pregnant, which Starra perceives as another threat to the team’s playoff chances — and her own college prospects. (“Ain’t no scout coming to little dusty Plainnole,” she tells the audience.)

The team also includes a resident nerd, Donna (Renita Lewis), who doesn’t need basketball to get a full scholarship to an out-of-state school, and Cherise (Ciara Monique), a born-again Christian who becomes increasingly anxious over Sidney’s threat to get an abortion as well as her own burgeoning romantic feelings for Donna.

Jones sets up both the characters and their overlapping moral dilemmas in a natural way, full of humor and a knowing understanding of how teenage female friendships can turn from supportive to hostile in time it takes to sink a free throw. Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction plays up the sense of camaraderie among the cast as well as the script’s laughs (the savvy insertion of select ’90s R&B classics complement the overall effect of depicting this milieu with, literally, TLC).

At the center is the magnificent cast, particularly Matthews as the sharp-elbowed Starra. The actress recalls a young Regina King, drawing our attention to this forthright but troubled young woman whose ambitions sometimes eclipse her judgment and who is clearly smarting from the absence of her mother. Even as she commits a flagrant (off-court) personal foul against April, one that threatens to disintegrate the entire team, she seeks to justify her behavior: “The first thing my mama taught me about basketball is this. Everybody play a lil’ foul. Everybody play a lil’ dirty. Basketball is a contact sport. That’s just the way it is.” But Matthews manages to hold our sympathy even in the midst of this betrayal.

In the second act, Jones stumbles into TV movie-of-the-week territory, even giving us a state-championship game finale and too-tidy resolutions to most of the story’s conflicts. Still, it’s hard to begrudge a Hollywood-style ending for these young women — who are so clearly and affectionately drawn over the course of the show’s two and a half hour running time.