“Io sto bene” is a quiet Italian take on the inter-European immigrant experience, a reverie recalled on two timelines as an old man’s encounter with a young woman reminds him of his accidental move to tiny Luxembourg over 50 years before.

Luxembourg-based writer-director Donato Rotunno (“Baby (a)alone”) traffics in nostalgia and concentrates on the little dramas of closely-observed lives in this gentle but generally unaffecting melodrama, Luxembourg’s contender for a Best Foreign Language Oscar nomination a couple of years back.

In the mid-60s, three young friends with no knowledge of foreign languages and few marketable skills ride a train north from their Italian village. A conductor checks their passports and work visas and tells them something they didn’t realize before leaving home.

Vito (Vittorio Nastri) is headed to Belgium. Wait, aren’t we all? No. Giussepe (Maziar Firouzi) will be seeking his fortune in Germany and Antonio (Alessio Lapice) is heading for Luxembourg. Wait, Luxembourg isn’t in Germany? Or Belgium?

Well, they’ll straighten that out when they get there they figure.

But a very old Antonio (Renato Carpentieri), feted as he retires and tries to motor home from the business he helped build in an Alfa Romeo he hasn’t driven in decades, recalls that they never did.

What jars his memory is having a fender bender that a young woman, Leo (Sara Serraiocco), sees and that makes her offer to drive him home. Leo’s an Italian DJ, working the clubs, struggling to make it in a new country just as Antonio did many years before.

The film is about their connection in the present and how that triggers his memories of the ups and downs of his sad saga, moving far from home, losing touch with family and friends, writing back to his parents with letters that always include “Io sto bene,” “I am fine.”

In the present, Antonio is in the process of selling his flat and moving to assisted living, as he is newly-widowed and walks with a cane. The story’s long flashbacks show us his early life in the country, cheated by the locals as he works hard as a laborer, mason and house painter, the “meet cute” moment he meets his future wife, Mady (Marie Jung) and the reason he still walks with a limp.

In the present, he is winding life down. But in this mercurial Italian stranger who brought a college degree in graphic design and a yen for elaborately conceived video to accompany her club mixes north from Italy, he sees something of himself, and a chance to pay it forward.

“In Italy,” Leo tells him (in Italian with English subtitles), “you spend your day waiting.” For a spot in line to apply for a job. When you complain, “they say their are thousands like you.”

She was “suffocating.” So it was with Antonio. But when he met the assertive, demanding Luxembourger Mady, he found purpose, drive, a need to “become a man” and become a success. But there were tests and missteps along the way. Heartbreaks too, it is implied, but those are mostly off-camera.

Leo is being similarly tested, a young woman lacking direction and anyone to help her find her way.

The chief shortcoming of the movie with the generic every-letter-home-everywhere title is that there’s nothing more to it than this.

There’s a hint of sweetness to old Antonio’s concern for Leopoldina, and a rash edge to her reluctance to accept help, even after a club owner sexually assaults her and blackballs her.

But otherwise, their stories don’t interrelate well. As interesting as skipping through the ebb and flow of his earlier life — writing love letters on behalf of Vito to the younger sister of Giuseppe is bound to bring trouble when everybody goes “home” for a visit — might be, there’s not enough here to fashion a compelling generational changing-of-the-guard narrative.

The wistful regrets that accompany such an uprooting, loved ones who break off contact, possibilities lost because of the curse of a country lacking opportunities going back generations, tell us everything letters that begin with “I am fine” leave out. It’s just not consequential, exceptional or interesting enough to add up to a more compelling movie.

Rating: unrated, one scene of violence, sex, profanity, smoking

Cast: Renato Carpentieri, Alessio Lapice, Sara Serraiocco, Marie Jung, Vittorio Nastri and Maziar Firouzi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Donato Rotunno. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:36