It’s clear from an ever-intensifying slate of family dramas and police thrillers that there’s much to say about the insidious ways America’s carceral systems destroy families. To name a few, there’s Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, Shaka King’s Judas and The Black Messiah, and for the limited series lovers, Mare of Easttown.

With Blue Bayou, writer, director, and actor Justin Chon joins this cannon of highly personal works about systemic injustice. This time, it’s a story about the long-established colonialism that has shaped the international adoption system in the U.S., and led to baffling and heartbreaking stories of family separation. Chon stars as Antonio LeBlanc, a New-Orleans-raised tattoo artist adopted as a baby from South Korea. He’s a doting stepfather who struggles to get additional work when his wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander, who does her best at manic pixie southern wife) gets ready to give birth to their daughter. Antonio received two felony convictions as a teenager for stealing motorcycles, so he cannot get a job as a mechanic despite his skills. Things don’t get better. One night, he encounters police officers Denny (The Place Beyond the Pines alum Emory Cohen, in an especially nasty turn) and Ace (Mark O’Brien), who also happens to be his stepdaughter’s absent biological father. They harass, assault, and arrest him. Then it’s revealed that Antonio’s adoptive parents never initiated his naturalization process–he’s placed into ICE custody and suddenly faces deportation to a country he has never known.

The tragedy at the center of Blue Bayou is a real one: Tens of thousands of international adoptees have been deported or are facing deportation due to adoption agency negligence, misunderstandings of citizenship processes by lawyers, and aggression on the part of the US Immigration officials. Adoptee Phillip Clay committed suicide after being deported as an adult; Monte Haines was abused in foster homes as a child for years before being adopted to a family that was misled about the naturalization process and never secured him citizenship. Haines was deported in 2009, more than 30 years after his adoption, and has been struggling to survive in Korea ever since.

Adoptee deportation is a powerful, enraging issue, yet Chon’s filmmaking doesn’t rise to the level of his subject. Blue Bayou is sentimental about the individual goodness that does nothing to challenge circumstances that tear loving families apart: Antonio’s friend Merk (Toby Vitrano) is himself an ICE officer; Ace, the corrupt policeman/biological father who plays a part in Antonio’s arrest, gets a chance to redeem himself. Like Beasts of the Southern Wild, this is an indie film that both romanticizes and exploits poverty and identity. Antonio befriends a kindly Vietnamese woman, Parker (played deftly by Linh Dan Pham), going through trials of her own. Their relationship is tentative, but never builds beyond Antonio’s own torment and confusion about his difficult past and impending future. We don’t get to know Parker very well, and her characterization is limited to her sympathetic nature towards the suffering Antonio.

Between Kathy and Parker’s thin and narrative-accommodating development, there is a patriarchal thrust to the film that Chon seeks to soften with fatherly doting. Antonio and his young stepdaughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske) are very close, and when Ace returns to the scene, she’s reluctant to connect to this man who looks like her yet shares no bond with her. We experience the inhumanity of the U.S. immigration system through the watchful eyes of this white, U.S.-born child, who cannot understand the rites and rules that determine who is officially acknowledged as American and who is not.

In the end, the love between Antonio and Jessie is not enough to hold the film together. We get a smattering of piercing thoughts about family separation as sanctioned by the U.S. government and a roster of deeply felt performances, but not the vision to see it through.

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