Mogul Mowgli piles a lot on its plate. Heavy themes, like assimilation, identity, honesty in art, are all wrapped up in a plot we’ve seen many times before. That it manages to get off the ground and remain engrossing is to actor/co-writer Riz Ahmed and co-writer/director Bassam Tariq’s credit.

Zed (actual name Zaheer) is a British rapper of Pakistani descent whose lyrics focus on his identity and confusion and ultimately pride. He’s been at the game for a while, and it looks like he might finally break out. On the final night of his U.S. tour, he is offered an opening slot for an established rapper on a world tour, which takes place in a week. His ambition does not endear his girlfriend (Aiysha Hart) to him, though, and she breaks up with him, but not without noting that for someone who raps so much about his heritage, he hasn’t visited his family in two years. Chastened and alone, he does just that. 

Once he’s there, the disconnection between Zed and his family, who are observant Muslims, is obvious. His father and mother both work to maintain their small flat, yet his mother has not yet opened the new dishwasher that Zed bought for her four months earlier. During a Ramadan dinner, he is chastised by his brother-in-law for taking on an English nickname. Later, he suffers what seems to be a seizure after a run-in with a fan of Zed’s rap rival and ends up in the hospital.

Turns out he has a rare immune disorder. His white cells are attacking his muscles, or as his doctor states, “Your body can’t recognize itself, so it’s attacking itself,” which is a metaphor that’s a bit too on the nose. However, he can get an experimental procedure, but that may leave him sterile. This terrifies his father, Bashir (an absolutely on-point Alyy Khan), because “without children, what are you?” So, he takes Zed to an acquaintance who practices cupping, cutting the patient and using suction to draw out the blood.

This leads to a surrealistic sequence, which occur throughout, of Zed’s—or at some points, Zaheer’s—battle to reconcile all his identities into a more cohesive individual. Sometimes Zed is followed around by a large man wearing a wedding veil of flowers that masks his face (his image is first seen on the cover of a cassette of his father’s that Zed notices while searching for some of his very early mixtapes). Sometimes a forlorn child appears in a netherworld, hiding in what looks like a tent or on a train. This is most likely an allusion to the violent partition of Pakistan and India, which his father survived. These images are satisfyingly surreal and unexplained, and it’s up to the viewer to suss them out.

As I said, this is a movie with a lot on its mind. Issues of identity are paramount. Zed doesn’t feel comfortable in either Britain or his parents’ Pakistan, and absolutely doesn’t feel at home with his family. What saved him all is life, or what allowed him to address these issues, was music, and now that isn’t enough when he can’t perform. In the funniest sequence, the rapper RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan), the rival who ends up taking Zed’s place on the tour, makes a series of out-of-left-field comparisons, and a snippet of one of RPG’s videos is a pitch-perfect parody of the “bling and bitches” genre.

Riz Ahmed, who co-wrote the screenplay, is one of his generation’s most talented, intense actors, following in the tradition of DeNiro, Day-Lewis, and Pacino. His performance here is, as expected, great: detailed and never staid. Unlike some of his recent roles, The Night of and Sound of Metal, he allows a bit of humor to sneak in, particularly in his reaction to RPG.

Ultimately, after juggling story lines and themes, Mogul Mowgli settles on one that admirably captures all the others within a beautifully written scene while managing to be uplifting as well.