The pull of the American Dream lies at the heart of Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, a story about a Korean immigrant family seeking out their chunk of economic ascension on Arkansas farmland. Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead) is Jacob Yi, an uncompromising patriarch dedicated to leaving his illustrious career of chicken sexing behind (more on this later) to grow crops from back home for the ever-increasing Korean-American population.

Told with a reserved tenderness, Minari is a subtle and understated slice of life drama; the kind that critics tend to fawn over but may leave general audiences asking, “That’s it?” The plot is simple: as the Yi family struggles to balance both full-time jobs and the ambitions of starting a farm from scratch, they import grandmother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) from their homeland to help with kids David (Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Kate Cho), who themselves are trying to find balance between their Korean and American roots.

This tale of assimilation in 1980s America is clearly near and dear to writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s heart, who writes from his own experience as a Korean-American growing up on the small rural Arkansas farm town. There a clear-eyed nostalgia slathered on the screen here, one that honors both his family history and the general immigrant experience and Chung remains both optimistic and forgiving in his account of assimilation, where even those who screw up their faces at the arrival of a Korean family aren’t bad people so much as they are surprised to see their kind all the way out in the middle of farmland.

Much of Minari’s drama is mined from Jacob and wife Monica’s (Han Ye-ri) increasingly turbulent marriage. Though their ambition to strike out together to make a better life for themselves and their family is clear, they have become divided in their approach, a division that threatens to untether the family. There’s a specificity to the relationships, between husband and wife, mother and daughter, grandmother and grandson, that rings true and touches upon a more universal experience of the tides of family though it might not be enough to trance the more casual viewer.

Under the A24 banner, Minari remains in a lower-gear for much of the film’s 115 minute running, which may test the patience of viewer’s expecting more pizzaz and big plot moments. Instead, Minari revels in the small moments and performances and under Chung’s direction, delivers one of the best ensemble casts of the year. Youn Yuh-jung in particular is a radiant discovery that makes the film worthwhile all by her lonesome as is a devout Will Patton as a fundamentalist Christian farmhand.

A favorite out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Minari celebrates and laments the small moments of growing up without overly dramatizing the minutia of those moments. Perhaps my biggest takeaway from this all though is that chicken sexing is an actual job that people have (had?); one where sorters pick through the males and female chicks and send the former off to a big oven to burn. Tough luck for my dudes. The question remains: is the chicken sexing an allegory for this relationship? Will Monica throw the stubborn Jacob to the flames? Are men but baby chickens after all?

CONCLUSION: An exercise in understated family drama, Minari tells a hopeful saga of assimilation that pulls from writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s own experience. The ensemble cast is great though I am hesitant to say that this is a movie that I’ll remember existing months down the line.