A teen’s plans for college and a brighter future are derailed when she finds out she’s an undocumented immigrant in “Marisol,” a compelling if melodramatic version of the struggle to get to America narrative.

Films from “El Norte” to “A Better Life,” “Sin Nombre” to “La Misma Luna” have covered the perilous path many from Central America and Mexico take to get to the United States, and their reasons for coming. The timely “Marisol” shows us a potential DACA “dreamer” who finds out, at the worst possible moment, that she might need such a program, as she never realized she wasn’t born a U.S. citizen.

The title character in Claire Audrey Aguayo’s script is a Rio Valley, Texas teen, a “good girl” who cleans stables for a neighbor and cares for his horses, who studies hard and just got a scholarship and has an interview with a University of California-Davis recruiter.

Marisol, played by Esmeralda Camargo in an engaging, empathetic debut performance, lives with her single-mom aunt (Liana Mendoza) and her aimless 20ish son Jaime (Max Pelayo). But things start to go wrong the minute she confers with the Incel classmate this Texas high school has left in charge of the computerized college interview schedule.

“Justin,” given an awkward-with-an-edge portrayal by Theo Taplitz of “Wyrm” and Little Men,” flirts clumsily, jokes menacingly and just so happens to be going to the same party at the local hideout the kids call “The Lot” tonight.

Mirasol is brusque when he makes a cruel joke, polite but nothing more when he approaches her again in school and decidedly uninterested when he then comes up to her at the party and then gets into it with her hostile cousin.

We know Mirasol shouldn’t be at this party, but her bestie Helen (Mia King) can be pretty persuasive. We and she know she should leave when the evening takes a bit of a turn, something Helen won’t hear of. She has her college admissions interview tomorrow, after all.

What Marisol doesn’t know and what Justin and we do know is how telling her lack of a social security number is on her interview sign-up form. And we know that whatever happens that evening is going to flip his “f–king wetback” button and there’s almost sure to be an “incident.”

When a cop (Ricky Catter) comes to talk with her aunt, Marisol’s tearful Tia Carmen — a nurse working with a lawyer to get her own visa — tells her niece she shouldn’t come home “tonight.” Things spiral from there as a panicked teen takes help from her community to flee and perhaps go find her estranged mother “al norte,” to the north, in Kansas.

Director Kevin Abrams (“I Got a Monster”) balances Marisol’s potentially-perilous odyssey with friend Helen’s frantic efforts to find her (the aunt and cousin have their own problems), the police officer’s collection of differing accounts of “the incident” and Justin’s online spiral into (skinny) Proud Boy vigilantism.

There’s suspense in almost every stage of the underground railroad for undocumented aliens that Marisol takes, from Texas to Topeka to Des Moines on towards Minneapolis, especially when the person accepting this help is a teenage girl.

The Making of an Incel stuff is infuriating. And the local police/ICE turf wars are depressingly realistic.

The one big thing working against how all this plays is how over-familiar the ground is, how even with the occasional twist or bit of misdirection from the script, we’ve kind of seen this and we pretty much know where it’s headed.

But Camargo puts a sympathetic face on a statistic, an innocent child targeted, and the collateral damage that spills over from that shatters lives, limits futures and has blowback that the online anti-immigration zealots can’t begin to fathom.

Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Esmeralda Camargo, Liana Mendoza, Ricky Catter, Max Pelayo, Mia King and Theo Taplitz.

Credits: Directed by Kevin Abrams. scripted by Claire Audrey Aguayo. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:31