Werner Herzog’s 1987 film “Cobra Verde” was the last and the most acrimonious collaboration between the director and the actor Klaus Kinski before the latter’s death in 1991. Both men shared a near 20-year history of creation through on-set conflict. But even by the standards of their previous films — “Aguirre the Wrath of God,” “Nosferatu,” and “Woyzeck,” — the shoot for “Cobra” was apparently agonizingly arduous.

Mr. Herzog has said that when the crew arrived in Ghana, West Africa, to begin filming, Kinski, a notoriously confrontational and inexhaustibly difficult actor to direct under the best of circumstances, was “coming totally apart.”

“Cobra Verde” has never received a theatrical release in New York, and it opens today at the IFC Center in a new print. Seen projected, the film is something of a revelation. In interviews Mr. Herzog tends to downplay the finished result because of the particularly unpleasant personal ordeal of its making. Certainly Kinski is over the top. Crouched in the film’s opening shot, a 360-degree pan around a parched South American desert landscape strewn with dead and dying animal remains, he somehow manages to appear manic. But the film, based on Bruce Chatwin’s druggily detailed historical novel, “The Viceroy of Ouidah,” is itself unhinged. Mr. Herzog and Kinski deserve to take a bow for making “Cobra Verde” so frequently grimly enchanting.

Mr. Herzog all but tossed Chatwin’s book into the story Cuisinart. What remains is a narrative shell that sees Francisco Manoel da Silva (here combined with another of the book’s characters, a barefoot outlaw named Cobra Verde), a down-on-his-heels Brazilian entrepreneur, wins the favor of a successful sugar baron who invites him into his home. But when all three of landowner’s unmarried daughters become pregnant, Don da Silva (Kinski) finds himself promptly shipped off to Africa to complete the seemingly impossible task of reopening the West African slave trade.

Don da Silva proves to be amorally suited to job, however. He quickly becomes embroiled in a palace intrigue involving trading slaves for rifles with the King of Dahomey (played with unsurprising authenticity by actual African King, His Royal Highness Nana Agyefi Kwame II of Nsein).

One gets the impression that Mr. Herzog, usually nothing if not uncompromising, was forced to capitulate to Kinski so much that the director arrived back from location shoots in Ghana and Guatemala with footage very different than whatever he set out to get. “Cobra Verde” begins with a blind balladeer setting up the story as a mythic tale of man’s hunger for conquest at all costs. But, due in part to Kinski’s apparent dogged opposition to most of Mr. Herzog’s ideas, “Cobra Verde” is far from the lyrical pseudo-Western ballad it was likely intended to be. Instead, it is a jagged assemblage of scenes that reek of cutting-room forensics.

This is not a bad thing. There are moments and sequences that combine Mr. Herzog’s characteristic documentarian eye for locale with a fitful epic vision that is frequently breathtaking. In his outlaw persona, Kinski dons poncho and hat as if in a spaghetti western. A sequence involving the training of an all-female native army that Don da Silva assembles to overthrow the slaver king approaches the physical scope of Cy Enfield’s venerable 1960s road-show warhorse “Zulu.” A group of blissful, innocent topless West African maidens revel in a ritual dance as Don da Silva walks among them and leers hungrily at their nubile bodies. As Kinski smacks his Jagger-esque lips, his character embodies the personal predatory lust beneath the politics of colonial exploitation.

Poetic, narrative, and historical truth vividly intersect throughout “Cobra Verde.” Never more so than in the film’s final sequence. As a polio-stunted African man looks on, Don Da Silva, a few steps ahead of his enemies, attempts to save his own life by dragging a boat out into the surf. Kinski, just a few years short of his own death by heart attack, performs this ultimately fatal struggle with a hammy abandon that beggars description. Though lit to shadowlessness by the African sun, the scene showcases the twilight of an actor’s career, a man’s life, and an era of sanctioned cruelty for profit.

Despite an inscrutable impressionism that at times borders on chaos, “Cobra Verde” fittingly brings down the curtain on one of the greatest, and certainly one of the weirdest actor-director relationships in movie history.