Starring Nadim Sawalha. In Arabic with English subtitles. Rating not available. Opens Friday, April 9, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

Without the drive to make the first feature-length film to come out of Jordan, young Jordanian-American Amin Matalqa never would have got Captain Abu Raed past the drawing board. And then we wouldn’t get to see this sweet-tempered, not entirely sugarcoated, slice of everyday life in the Arab world, 95 percent of which does not involve religious extremism, oil, or world-shaking events.

Ambition also affects the main character, an easygoing airport janitor named Abu Raed, played wonderfully by Nadim Sawalha (father, by the way, of AbFab’s Julia Sawalha). His good relations with the jet set, combined with a well-read, largely untapped imagination, gets him in unexpected trouble. When he nabs a left-behind airline captain’s hat, the kids in his poor Amman neighbourhood take him for a hotshot pilot and demand travel anecdotes, which he gleefully provides.

One kid questions the validity of these tales—so do I, for aesthetic reasons—and Raed recognizes that the boy (Hussein Al-Sous) has trouble at home. Like Amreeka, unfortunately, this low-budget venture suffers from too much exposure to Hollywood. The desire to hit sellable plot points, shoot swooning set pieces that look good in trailers, and ladle orchestral syrup on everything reflects impulses that undermine other, better intentions. Matalqa probably thinks you have to have those things to raise money and sell tickets, and he may be right.

Fortunately, a subplot about our hero’s avuncular relationship with a female pilot (Rana Sultan) survives her being too pretty and wearing too much makeup for the hot lights. And in the end, the movie lingers as a celebration of all the middle-aged Abu Raeds who, for whatever reasons, have not lived up to their full potential—but have never stopped looking at the sky.