Ewa arrives with her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan), who has a lung illness and tries to refrain from coughing as they go through immigration. But it is to no avail. Her illness is detected and she is sent into quarantine on Ellis Island with the threat of deportation hovering if her health does not improve.

Ewa, already distraught over being separated from her sister, finds herself held and also threatened with being sent back amid accusations of her behaving immorally on the ship to America. Enter her so-called rescuer, who works for an aid organization but is mired in bribery corruption with Ellis island personnel to advance his personal schemes. He has deftly manipulated the situation after he spies Ewa as prey. He gets her released to perform in a vaudeville act in a seedy Lower East Side joint, with the semi-nude women dancers doubling as prostitutes.

Bruno, this unscrupulous pimp, is portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix with persistently overwrought acting meant to pass as complexity. On the one hand Bruno professes to extend kindness, but his every move is a ruse to exploit Ewa and other hapless women. He convinces Ewa that she must earn money to pay for bribery to get her sister released. Ewa fights against her victimization with her hard-honed sense of survival, and is not above manipulation of her own. Cotillard’s acting, mostly understated, builds our sympathy for Ewa.

The film begins to take a nosedive with the appearance of Jeremy Renner as Orlando, a vaudeville magician and Bruno’s cousin, who is drawn to Ewa, causing jealousy in Bruno, not so much for romantic reasons but as a threat to his domination and exploitation of Ewa. This burdensome side plot heads toward an inevitable violent confrontation.

Phoenix chews the scenery more and more, especially as the film charges to its climax when money is paid to an Ellis island guard to rescue Magda after a trip in a row boat to take Ewa and Magda back to Manhattan. By this time Bruno is in a drunken state and a mess, courtesy of all the overacting.

But all of this cannot obscure the original concept of a portrait of what it can be like for a desperate soul to arrive in America at the time and attempt to navigate the traps that both await and provide a way out. Along the trail there has been Ewa’s hope for religious salvation and forgiveness for the bad things she has done. There also has been her relationship with a sympathetic aunt who aids Ewa despite the aunt’s husband, who is furious and rejects Ewa as an embarrassing fallen woman.