Starring Tatyana Ali and Lyriq Bent. Rated 14A.

Home Again is not the picture of Jamaica you are going to get in a Beaches resort ad, and that’s the point.

Actually filmed mostly in Trinidad, the new Canadian flick takes you places you’d never go as a vacationer. You can practically smell the roti and the thick tropical air in scenes that deke between grubby Kingston alleyways, packed market stalls, back-yard goat corrals, and Rastafarian holy places. It goes without saying the reggae-washed soundtrack rules, and there are even artfully placed subtitles for all that rapid-fire patois.

Toronto director Sudz Sutherland has style to burn, but he’s got higher goals. Home Again is aimed at shedding light on the plight of thousands of deportees from Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Thanks to current immigration rules, when they commit “low-level crimes”, they’re shipped back to Jamaica—a country many haven’t lived in since they were toddlers—and thrust into a land already squeezed by economic and social problems.

Sutherland focuses the story on three deportees: a mother from Toronto, a good-hearted gangsta from New York, and a teen from the U.K. Of the stories, Marva’s (Tatyana Ali) veers into the melodramatic and Everton’s (Stephan James) journey from preppie teen to homeless addict is a bit extreme. It’s Lyriq Bent’s charismatic Trenchtown gangsta Dunston who holds most interest, inhabiting Jamaica’s violent underworld and falling for a girl (singer Fefe Dobson) who wants no part of it.

The message is earnest (occasionally too much so), but the best thing Home Again has going for it is the way it immerses you in a world of wildly conflicting sensations: turquoise-walled homes, rusted corrugated fences, banana bushes, and raucous bars that serve food on Styrofoam plates. When, late in the movie, you actually glimpse inside one of Jamaica’s blandly cheery all-inclusives—one of Marva’s last, humiliating chances at a job—it seems positively antiseptic.