“Fremont” is a droll comedy about the immigrant experience that only has to hint at the trauma such uprootings often involve, and about how residents of the host country generally don’t have a clue about what this newcomer is dealing with, or how to help.

The Iranian-born director and co-writer Babak Jalali has imagined this as a fish-out-of-water tale where our heroine is so isolated she can’t express so much as a smile to fit in, can’t talk about herself or her issues even to the fellow countrymen and women relocated to a modest residence motel in Fremont, California.

What’s funny isn’t what she can’t talk about. It’s her deadpan reactions to almost everyone around her.

Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is young, pretty and reserved. She’s college educated, and she speaks English. She’s got a job at a nearby (San Francisco) fortune cookie factory. But she can’t sleep. And there’s virtually no one she can tell this to, no hint of reasons why until we learn a couple of simple facts.

She’s from Afghanistan. She worked as a translator for the U.S. military there. Some of her fellow Afghans now living with her in that hotel shun her and regard her as a traitor. Her family “back home” may have problems with the Taliban over her work and her departure.

Her blue-collar co-workers aren’t deep thinkers, so there’s no confiding in “work friends.”And when she finally gets to see a shrink (Greg Turkington), he won’t simply give her pills. He wants to talk. But what he wants to talk about is his favorite novel “about immigrants.” It’s Jack London’s tale of a wolf-dog, “White Fang.”

That’s the kind of subtle humor Jalali goes for here, dry and a tad dopey. For it to work, Zada has to almost never crack a smile, never change her expression at all as Donya does a variation of what she must have done back in Afghanistan.

She indulges her Chinese karaoke-obsessed co-worker (Hilda Schmelling). She takes the “promotion” to “message writer” at this old, “hand-made” fortune cookie factory, indulging her boss. She indulges the only psychotherapist in the world to think “White Fang” has something to say of Afghan immigrants.

But as she indulges one and all, she starts to come out of her shell almost in spite of herself and the efforts of those she’s humoring just to get some sleep. Little acts of rebellion pop out at the hotel, in the fortunes she writes for the cookies her factory sells.

Jalali — “Land,” “Radio Dreams” and “Frontier Blues” were his — stages scenes with a Jim Jarmusch paience and simplicity — an exchange of static one-shots as the deadpan shrink and deadpan Donya debate whether she should even be there (she’s taken a friend’s appointment), a patient and lightly-amusing lecture from a kind and somewhat philosophical Chinese-American factory owner about what she should be writing.

“Fortune messages are a responsibility.”

“They shouldn’t be too lucky. They shouldn’t be too unlucky. They shouldn’t be too short. They shouldn’t be too long. They shouldn’t be too original. They shouldn’t be too obvious.”

“Virtue,” he tells her, “stands in the middle.”

If there’s sounder advice for how to get along in America or the world, I’ve not heard it. And if we worry for Donya, something about her short emotional journey reassures us that whatever she’s been through, however dire what she’s not talking about might have been, she’s going to be fine.

And if her future seems unwritten and full of possibility, that might be because “The fortune you seek is in the next cookie.”

Rating: unrated, PG worthy

Cast: Anaita Wali Zada, Hilda Schmelling, Greg Turkington and Jeremy Allen White

Credits: Directed by Babak Jalali, scripted by Carolina Cavalli and Babak Jalali A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:31