THE ODD COUPLE: Red West (left) and Souleymane Sy Savane.

There are two movies running side by side in Goodbye Solo. One of them, which is predictable enough to set my watch by, is about the unlikely friendship (read: one guy’s African, one’s American) between a Senegalese cab driver named Solo and the emotionally wrecked William (Red West), who recruits Solo to drive him to his auto-da-fé in the mountains. This dolorous odd-couple tale plays out as a Jarmusch-ish lark shoehorned into a dreadfully conventional narrative. Director Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop) either lacks confidence in his abilities or simply underestimates the 100-plus years humanity has invested in the language of cinema, but Goodbye Solo contains more extraneous orientating signs (multiple shots of Solo’s finger pointing to a calendar so we might know that, holy shit, the movie is moving forward) than the DMV, and more overwrought symbols than a fiction issue of The New Yorker.

However, the other movie in Goodbye Solo introduces the world to Souleymane Sy Savane, who, as Solo, breathes real life into the tired cliché of the African immigrant seemingly overcome by joie de vivre at every turn. If only that first, lesser movie would go away long enough for us to get to know Solo and the sorrow that hides behind his smile. The sincerity of Savane’s performance is matched by Bahrani’s eye for the grimy sadness of the motel-dwelling, tobacco-stained lives of a certain breed of working-class guy. Maybe it’s just where I grew up, but I’ve seen this William character before, and I’ve been waiting to see him in the movies: With a face that has been mauled by life, and fingers that are huge and strong from work, he’s ditched his apartment for a weekly rate in some beige dilapidation on the same street as all the used-car dealerships. This hard and quiet kind of life is too rarely dramatized with much success in American cinema (hey there, Darren Aronofsky), and while Bahrani does it justice, there is no ignoring that other movie right next door, nudging you out of your reflections and on to the next obvious plot point.