A young Belarusian immigrant finds himself questioning his “deal” with the French Foreign Legion — enlistment and service in exchange for citizenship — after a particularly brutal combat encounter in “Disco Boy,” a dreamy Immigrant’s Experience Odyssey from writer-director Giacomo Abbruzzese.

Abbruzzese, a documentary filmmaker making his fictional feature debut, tells a story of outsider struggle and a sort of shared victimhood between the Belarusian who joins the Legion for citizenship in a better country with the promise of a better life, and a young man from Niger who sees his country and people still exploited by its former colonial masters, who are all European and often French.

Our tale takes two young men, Alex and Mikhail, from their wily escape from Belarus through Poland to France. Only one survives. His journey is a terrible trial and takes days. At the end of it, his easy pass into French life is joining the Foreign Legion, a largely-immigrant force that trades fighting service for citizenship and “a new life.”

Alex will be tested by the usual boot camp ordeals. And he will come to question the entire bargain when he’s sent as part of an elite team that must ignore the other horrors of a conflict zone and only rescue the French hostages who are their mission.

Alex (Franz Rogowksi) is destined to run afoul of Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), a young African revolutionary fighting in the Niger River Delta, whose group kidnaps French oil workers and others to draw the world’s attention to their plight via foreign media coverage. And if Alex and Jomo must tangle, Jomo’s sister Udoka (Laetitia Ky) is sure to be drawn into this conflict.

Abbruzzese serves up revolutionary PR and messaging — “performing” for an American (Vice) TV reporter — and gives us vivid first-person combat experience, commandos with radio coms and night-vision fighting gear who find themselves in a shootout with river rebels in the dark, with Alex fighting to the death with one foe seen only in a heat signature.

And we see the tribal life, ritual dances and African world interrupted by the intrusion of foreigners and their lust for oil.

It’s a somewhat unfocused narrative, relying on music and “disco” dance as a bonding device, one of a few novel touches in a story that’s all-too-familiar, with the Croatian-French drill instructor (Leon Lucev) being the one novelty in the boot-camp-to-combat film formula.

Their sergeant leads the men in “No Je ne regrette rien” as a marching song. That and the cryptic, curative dance-off finale break free of the cliches of the genre just enough to make “Disco Boy” worth taking in.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Franz Rogowski, Morr Ndiaye, Leon Lucev, Michal Balicki and Laetitia Ky

Credits: Scripted and directed by Giacomo Abbruzzese. A Charades release.

Running time: 1:38