Everybody that Souleymane (Abou Sangare) encounters has an angle. The Guinean immigrant is nothing if not a hustler, zipping through the streets of Paris on his bicycle making food deliveries at all hours of the night in order to scrape together the funds to buy some asylum papers to present to OFPRA (the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons). But while he has surrounded himself with a community of African immigrants who are theoretically willing to guide him through the process, everybody’s service comes with a price. And the services themselves are nothing to brag about.

Without legal citizenship, he’s unable to make his own account on any of the food delivery apps — so an acquaintance is nice enough to let Souleymane use his, taking 50 percent of the revenue for his troubles while Souleymane does 100 percent of the work. He also pays to be coached for his upcoming immigration interview, though he’s given the questionable advice to fabricate sob stories about being attacked by political enemies in order to gain asylum — that is, when he’s not being shaken down for even more money. Life is hard enough for an unhoused, undocumented gig economy worker just trying to make ends meet, but his biggest problem might be the slew of grifters nickel and diming him out of every penny he has.

Boris Lojkine’s new film “Souleymane’s Story” follows its eponymous immigrant over the course of two days leading up to his asylum interview with OFPRA. A straightforward social realist drama, it invokes the traditions of films like “I, Daniel Blake” and “Tori and Lokita” by illustrating the Sisyphean tasks that vulnerable people can be subjected to while navigating the government bureaucracies that are ostensibly supposed to help them. But it also applies a modern touch to the subgenre by placing the unique challenges posed by the gig economy front and center.

Delivering food on his bike is the only form of income available to Souleymane, but racing through Paris traffic on cold, wet nights is the least of his problems. He navigates painfully slow restaurants, fickle customers who cancel orders on a whim, and elderly customers who don’t understand the new security code system that his service has implemented. All of these external delays ding his rating with the app’s all-powerful algorithm, which can lead to suspensions and delayed payments of money that he has already promised to people all over town. The delivery sequences are almost Sean Baker-esque in their depictions of the ways that poverty can turn the simplest of errands into a screwball comedy when everything seems to go wrong for you at every minute of the day.

“Souleymane’s Story” doesn’t blaze any trails that we haven’t seen before, and it sometimes gets too deep in the weeds of French immigration law for its own good, trading too much universality for specificity when a little less detail would have made the same point more effectively. But it nevertheless delivers exactly what its title promises: One man’s story as he navigates all of the ups and downs of the two biggest days of his life before pleading his case to remain in France. Sangare embodies the character with an appropriately battered resilience, while Lokjine and co-writer Delphine Agut hit him with challenge after challenge that feel surprising and inevitable at the same time.

Sometimes Souleymane feels like he’s sprinting through a race with no finish line, and sometimes he’s running into an unmovable brick wall. The film exists in the space between those opposing outcomes, and its contradictions become its greatest strength as it depicts the endless exhaustion of navigating a system that doesn’t care about you nearly as much as it claims to.

Grade: B-

A Kino Lorber release, “Souleymane’s Story” opens in theaters on Friday, August 1.

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