Osman's (Dominic Rains) trying to settle into a new life in California, having moved there after seeking asylum from Afghanistan. He's living with the mother of a journalist he worked with, and gets a $50/week job with the local paper, writing the police blotter. After some initial disappointment, Osman leans into the job, deciding to use it as a way to get to know the country and the people, a way to go out an investigate and observe.
After a rough first encounter, he strikes up a friendship with a local guy, Lindsay (James Franco), who promises to introduce him to people in the area, help him understand who the real criminal element is. Then a man turns up dead in the woods, and Lindsay goes missing.
People, at various points, ask Osman if he's glad to be away from Afghanistan, away from the danger. Or ask him what it was like. And Osman will explain, politely and earnestly, that, yes, there were some terrifying or surreal moments, but for a long time he wanted to move away simply because he thought that was what you had to do to grow. This is while there are corpses turning up in the woods, while Osman is getting chased through those same woods later and having to beat a guy with a rock to save his own life. No one he tells is too surprised by that, nor that the man apparently survived and left. The lady he's staying with, who is a local cop, assures him it was self-defense, so he's fine, completely missing that isn't really what Osman's freaked out about.
The movie cuts in a few conversations between Osman and Gabe, his journalist friend, who is still in Afghanistan working with a different, 'cultural translator', as one character describes it. We only see bits of what's going on; an overturned car in the road at night, Gabe standing on a mountain somewhere, no towns in sight. We don't know what's happening, but I think the implication is, if Osman was there, he would understand and fit back in perfectly. Where he is, though, is alien to him, and he doesn't really have a good cultural translator. Everyone is holding things back. (Gabe, for example, apparently has spoken with his mom in months, for reasons we and Osman don't learn.) Or it's that they know how things work here so intuitively, they don't recognize that there's anything to explain to Osman.
Rains shifts between striding with purpose to drifting through crowds of people gathered around a bonfire outside the house of some local Mister Big. He spends a lot of time tapping or pounding on doors, peering through windows, trying to get someone to open up, to let him in. Often he doesn't. Mom Cop may only roll the car window down enough to tell him to stay there. Lindsay's mother may open the door, but only enough to see there's a guy asleep on her bed while her son's whereabouts are unknown (unknown to Osman, at least.) He has moments of glee, and moments where he's so frustrated the polite exterior cracks and he loses his temper, unable to understand what people aren't saying or why.
I don't know that I entirely understand the whys and wherefores of the plot, which would be something Osman and I have in common then. Whether that's by design or because the movie was trying so hard to give us a sense of Osman's confusion that it overdid it, I'm not sure.
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