“Mija” is a sluggish, meandering documentary that touches — but only touches — on something interesting: the experience of undocumented immigrants and their U.S.-born children.

Directed by Isabel Castro, the film follows two young American-born women, one an artists’ manager in Los Angeles and the other an aspiring pop singer from Texas, whose parents have lived, undocumented, in the United States for many years.

DorisMuñoz在发现了这位年轻的墨西哥裔美国歌手后，获得了令人惊讶的早期成功Cucoand manages him to a significant recording career. With her sudden prosperity, Muñoz is able to hire a lawyer to help her parents get green cards, and she’s able to financially support her struggling brother, who was deported to Mexico.

That would seem like a pretty good story, but the first part of the movie is marred by the control that Muñoz exerts over the material. We never see her doing the actual work of a manager. We just see her talking about it or having pointless, self-conscious conversations with family or friends.

In an apparent effort to artificially lend disparate scenes some cohesion, Castro has Muñoz narrate her own story and even lets Muñoz decide when the camera gets turned off. In an early scene, just as a moment threatens to get interesting — a fraught encounter between Muñoz and Cuco — Muñoz makes a subtle signal, and Castro stops filming.

For a fly-on-the-wall documentary such as this, the filmmaker needs full access going in, otherwise, a filmmaker winds up with the worst of both worlds: lots of casual, inconsequential behind-the-scenes moments, with everything tense, important and uncomfortable left out. That’s what we get here. In just about every scene, such as when Muñoz goes to visit her brother in Mexico, we know what to expect because there’s no stress in the encounter, and everyone is on their best behavior.

Occasionally, even a canned setup scene can work out, such as when Muñoz talks to her parents on Zoom, as they open the envelopes containing their green cards. Her father’s reaction (he bursts into tears) turns that into a touching moment. But that’s rare.

一旦Cuco和MuñozPart Company，Muñoz就会茫然 - 直到她发现新的人才来认可。杰克斯·霍普（Jacks Haupt）是来自李·哈维·奥斯瓦尔德（Lee Harvey Oswald）的旧社区，得克萨斯州达拉斯（Dallas）的橡树悬崖（Oak Cliff）的年轻女子，想成为一名歌手，反对父母的意愿，穆尼兹（Muñoz）将她作为客户。但是通常，除了一个简短的电话外，这部电影并没有显示出与父母的冲突。取而代之的是，这表明她和她的好男友一起出去玩，或者对穆尼兹（Muñoz）的职业生涯状况进行了预先的电话。

The second half of the movie becomes a kind of commercial for Haupt and her music — that is, a commercial for a product that we’re given precious little reason to want. We are forced to witness the slow and not-necessarily steady progress of a would-be singing star, a story that has only the most tangential relationship to the larger, supposed subject about undocumented immigrants and their American-born children.

Ultimately, “Mija” fails almost totally, and two main things tank it: (1) the lack of complete access to the subjects, who should have been grateful for the exposure, and (2) too much collaboration between the director and her subjects. There are documentaries and there are promotional films. A documentarian needs to keep those categories rigorously separate.

K“Mija”:Documentary. Starring Doris Muñoz and Jacks Haupt. Directed by Isabel Castro. In English and in Spanish with English subtitles. (Not rated. 85 minutes.) Opens Friday, Aug. 5, at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., S.F.www.roxie.com