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Director Mira Nair opens The Namesake with a train wreck and concludes it with a serene scene of a woman singing. These bookends aren't mere structural clichés, the dynamic intro and tranquil coda, as her seventh movie is very much concerned with journeys to find something resembling peace in lives that are consistently and repeatedly besieged by calamities both great and small. The Namesake is also, as her great 1991 Mississippi Masala remains, acutely aware of the American immigrant experience and how that process changes through the generations.

Ashoke Ganguli (Irfan Khan) is a young man on that train wreck, reading The Overcoat at the time of it. He grows up to become a New York academic, who travels back to Bengal to find a wife, Ashima (Tabu), who joins him in late-1970s America. They name their first son Gogol--a non-Bengali, non-American name, and not even a proper given name at that. Back home, children aren't bestowed first names for a number of years, and they're typically named by a relative. In America they have to name a child before it can leave the hospital, so, for the moment, Gogol will suffice.

And it's what he still goes by when he's graduating high school and reluctantly looking forward to college, when he's not getting high with his friends. Gogol (a fantastic Kal Penn, virtually unrecognizable from his Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle stoner) is a stereotypical second-generation American: He's visibly embarrassed by his parents' traditions, he doesn't understand the allure of the home country on visits, and yet he knows he doesn't quite fit into America's melting pot just yet, not even when he dates the blond, blue-blood, and consummate Manhattanite Maxine (Jacinda Barrett). Even a romance with fellow second-generation immigrant, the worldly, crackling-smart Moushumi (the intoxicatingly gorgeous Zuleikha Robinson), might not be the right match, though.

Gogol Ganguli is the titular centerpiece in Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 source novel, but Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala (who also wrote Mississippi Masala) spread the culture clashes and generation gaps throughout the entire family experience, making that unit the fabric that holds both the movie and its characters' lives together. The Namesake is a movie that suggests immigrant families live in transition, always bouncing between two destinations, neither of which they can rightly call home (Nair includes numerous shots of travel and bridges, those actual moments of transition, and even sets one key, emotional Gogol scene in an airport terminal, spotlighting his transitory nature.)

Despite the story's ephemeral formlessness, Nair pulls it off with her usual flair for lush colors and vivid, precisely tuned set pieces. A visit to the Taj Mahal conveys the expected grandiose sweep, but so does Ashima's comparably insignificant first trip to the Laundromat. The Namesake's lasting impressions arrive in such acknowledgements, that the seemingly large and small all depend on who is undertaking them and why, and in its refreshing admittance that immigrants don't have to choose between tradition and assimilation--that sometimes freedom can mean it's OK to forge your own way.

E-mail Bret McCabe