By Michael Marano

The performances in Mountains are astounding, and Monica Sorelle’s sure-handed direction heralds a new and formidable talent.

Mountains, directed by Monica Sorelle. Haitian Creole, English, and Spanish with English subtitles. Opening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on August 30. Screening at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston on September 12.

Atibon Nazaire in a scene from Mountains.

Ken Loach says that The Old Oak (Arts Fuse review) will be his final film, so there’s a real need to fill the politically progressive cinematic void he leaves behind. To a certain extent, Monica Sorelle’s debut feature, Mountains, steps into Loach territory. The narrative addresses issues of social concern: gentrification, immigration, wealth inequality, the working class, race, and what urban geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” (basically, rich assholes stealing your city and your sense of community from you).

Monica Sorelle’s Mountains steps into Loach turf. But … alas, her freshman effort does not entirely do the job.

This is a “kitchen sink” drama (filmed mostly in Creole with subtitles) about a Haitian-American guy named Xavier (played by Atibon Nazaire) whose job is to demolish homes and small businesses in Miami’s Little Haiti; these lots are being cleared to make space for high-end luxury condos and mansions. He’s living the American Dream — by destroying the urban infrastructure that gives him access to the American Dream. This is a guy sawing away at the tree branch on which he sits. The shots of Xavier in half-demolished and/or abandoned urban dead zones convey this idea beautifully.

Xavier dreams of getting a bigger piece of the pie for himself and his wife, Esperance (Sheila Anozier), a seamstress who really should have her own sewing room, and for his son Junior (Chris Renois), a college dropout trying to make it as a stand-up comedian. He has his eye on a bigger and nicer house in the neighborhood, but his job is part of the economic system that keeps pushing the affordability of the home he wants out of his reach. His ambition is a Chinese finger trap. The more he tries, the less able he is to escape the limits of his situation. Unfortunately, this is the case of the film itself.

On the one hand, the shots of Xavier’s and his friends’ and his family’s homes, as well as the aforementioned demolition sites, are viscerally tangible (you can taste the dust and splintered wood roasting in the Florida heat). But this dose of everyday reality is not effectively utilized as a background for a fully realized drama. The movie spins out plots and subplots, but they fizzle out. Yeah, real life doesn’t tie up loose ends neatly. But Mountains doesn’t provide a sense of completion. Each episode eddies in on itself, and for a movie that is about how a community (and maybe even a way of life) dies out, endings have to feel like endings. Mountains tries to give its audience a “slice of life.” But it provides “shavings of life,” and those just aren’t as satisfying as they should be.

Despite these faults, Mountains has a great many virtues. The performances are uniformly excellent. As Xavier, Nazaire is a big, bearish, lovable lug. Yet Nazaire uses quiet and stillness to portray the character to devastating effect: he communicates volumes with a wordless stare or by tilting his head forward by a tenth of a degree (especially when faced with not-so-micro-aggressions from co-workers, or listening to news reports of the upheavals going on in his native Haiti). You can taste the pride Anozier’s Esperance takes in her cooking, her sewing, her home. And when Anozier brings that sense of pride, that groundedness, to a rather brilliantly written moment of “code-switching,” the effect is devastating. Renois, as Junior, is chasing his own take on the American Dream, but Dad does not approve of his son’s version of it. Renois deftly walks an emotional tightrope as he lives with his skeptical folks while working on his comedy.

Xavier and his family are refugees twice over. They have escaped the oppression of the upheaval in Haiti only to have to grapple with the oppressive and gentrifying prosperity in the US. The realtors and developers in Miami are colonizers. It’s this sense of one’s struggles as never-ending that is the thematic backbone of Mountains, the title of which comes from the Haitian proverb, “Behind mountains, there are more mountains.” Unfortunately, given its many incomplete and unsatisfying narrative threads (except, perhaps, for the very end), the film never successfully ascends the first mountain. Still, the performances in Mountains are astounding, and Sorelle’s sure-handed direction heralds a new and formidable talent. The next mountain she climbs will likely be extraordinary.

Author, personal trainer, editor, and writing coach Michael Marano (www.BluePencilMike.com) has been writing about film for 34 years.