When considering Sin Nombre, writer-director Cary Fukunaga’s first feature-length film, I’m forced to consider that old dichotomy typical of festival-favorite films: do I gauge the film by its strength as a story, or by its value as an educational tool for festival audiences, namely middle-class white folk like myself?

Because as a story, Sin Nombre is fairly typical, even conventional. Young Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) has a chance to escape Honduras and head north with her father and uncle, through Mexico and into the United States and the dream of a better life. Their trip will be a hard one, complicated by Sayra’s attachment to a remorseful gangbanger named Casper (Edgar Flores).

Casper’s remorseful because the leader of the gang he’s been part of his whole life has just killed his girlfriend. On impulse Casper kills the gang leader in front of a younger initiate named Smiley (Kristian Ferrer) while they’re all robbing Sayra’s family. Casper lets Smiley go, and so the gang back home finds out and the call goes out: Casper must die.

Casper knows his days are numbered (perhaps even in single digits), but still Sayra clings to him, convinced that she will reach the U.S.A. delivered “not by the hands of God, but by the hands of the Devil.”

So there’s the count: Sayra desperately wants to get to America, and believes Casper will get her there. Casper is a haunted gangbanger with a ticking death clock and a flame of goodness that has not yet been snuffed. And Smiley, too young to know better, is eager to prove himself to the gang by any means necessary. Can you guess where all this is headed?

You’d be right. This conventional setup, coupled with performances that are good but not outstanding, makes Sin Nombre a standard-issue film festival darling: a story put through its paces to show the audience what the writer-director is capable of. It is not a bad film; it might even qualify as a good film, though in many ways it is unremarkable.

But there is that educational value. What Sin Nombre does have going for it is a bleakly pragmatic look at the process of moving north through a mostly hostile Mexico into the promised land beyond.

It will not be an easy trip. The four of them have much ahead of them: marching in searing heat, clinging to the top of freight trains for hundreds of miles, crossing wide rivers on rickety barges, and fending off thugs and bandits. Early on, Sayra’s father takes in the hundreds of willing immigrants gathered in a train yard and predicts half of them won’t make it. That estimate will prove to be a generous one.

Sin Nombre is also, occasionally, a beautiful movie to look at. Sayra and Casper and the rest, desperate as they are, still allow themselves to be humbled by the beauty of Mexico and the simple mercies offered to them along the way.

It’s a story that should and needs to be told: in America, the polarized debate about illegal immigration rarely takes into account what those immigrants have gone through to get here—provided they survive or are not shipped back to the dead-end life they were escaping. It is, in a way, a quintessentially American story, one that’s repeated itself since the days of the Mayflower.

But Sin Nombre makes no statements beyond perhaps the notion that America is still seen as the land of deliverance for many people. It is an observational film, offering empathetic insight into a world little-known to those of us living north of the border. If that insight were wedded to a stronger story, it may have the impact it so transparently hopes for. As it is, it can only stand briefly before falling onto the ever-growing pile of well-meaning movies that fail to strike a chord.