It’s enough of a feat to find genuinely new ways of rendering heartbreak and longing, but “Police Beat” manages that and more. Gorgeously photographed and startlingly addictive, Robinson Devor’s unlikely sounding triumph is a sensual immersion into the life of a lovelorn Senegalese-American cop in Seattle.

If you couldn’t jet out to Sundance last year, or missed the Film Comment Selects screening at the Walter Reade, Anthology Film Archives provides the chance to experience this beautiful stranger of a film with a week-long run that starts today. (Don’t wait – “United 93” will still be omnipresent next week, but this will be gone, maybe indefinitely.)

A friendly on-screen policeman, who goes by the name of Z. (first-timer Pape Niang), soberly patrols the verdant parks and waterways of the damp northwestern capital by bike. His thoughts are on his absent girlfriend. She’s away on a camping trip with a male friend – the curiously silent Z. checks his voice-mail every five minutes.

Z. doesn’t lack for work to distract him. Distress calls pack the movie in dreamily deadpan succession: a gardener who finds someone sleeping in a hedge, a lout sharpening a huge knife for his neighbor to see, a swimmer swallowed up in a lily pond. To each befuddled citizen, Z. is moral arbiter, wise adviser, and magical problem-solver.

His stream of consciousness is interwoven with an ever-humming symphony of the mad and restless city. He muses about his girlfriend and his life in voice-over, while unannounced shots of the police incidents provide their own exhilarating spikes of confusion, suffering, and anger.

Mr. Devor’s crafting of this complex subjectivity involves multilayered landscapes and soundscapes. In cinematographer Sean Kirby’s exquisite widescreen work, the leafy paths of Seattle’s parks earn it the moniker of the Emerald City, clear and misty at once. Ambient sound (distant traffic, water) and music by Erik Satie and the like situate us with the sense of being there. Together with Z.’s already once-removed, reflective yet urgent voiceover, outside is in, and inside out.

“Police Beat” shares its title with a police-report column penned by co-writer Charles Mudede (also African) for the Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger. An end credit indicates that the film’s criminal episodes are all from actual police logs, those annals of human oddity and extremity beloved by many (including yours truly). It’s a perfect final flourish for this endlessly surprising American original.

Through May 4 (32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street, 212-505-5181).