“A tardy and subordinate genre,” Jorge Luis Borges sniffed about the American Western novel in his “Lectures on American Literature.” What Borges meant, of course, was that the Western novel took its lead from the Hollywood Western film, which half a century ago was already settling into the ponderous and predictable. But Tommy Lee Jones’s “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” like “Brokeback Mountain,” proves that the contemporary West holds a universe of material Hollywood has hardly tapped.

Mr. Jones’s second directorial effort – his 1995 television movie, an adaptation of Elmer Kelton’s “The Good Old Boys,” was a respectful tribute to the values of old Westerns – is, unexpectedly, a great film. The script by Guillermo Arriaga, like those he wrote for “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams,” is fragmented and nonsequential. Mr. Jones’s direction, on the other hand, is taut and straightforward.The tension between the two seemingly disparate styles produces a story that builds surprising momentum without a standard plot.

“Three Burials” also benefits from a fine performance by Mr. Jones, who doesn’t seem in the least distracted by his directorial duties. Mr. Jones plays Pete Perkins, a foreman on a ranch near the Texas border who, perhaps to his own surprise, strikes up a friendship with an illegal immigrant worker, Melquiades (Julio Cesar Cedillo). The relationship does not seem forced: A lonely man yearning for roots, Pete is touched by Melquiades’s own yearning for his small-town home in Mexico. Almost offhandedly, Melquiades tells Pete that if he were to die in the United States, he would want his body taken back.

When Melquiades is accidentally shot by a border guard named Mike (Barry Pepper), Pete attempts to get the local sheriff, Belmont (Dwight Yoakam), involved. But none of these characters acts quite the way you expect him to. Mr. Yoakam’s sheriff refuses to pursue the case, not through overt racism or even a strong desire to protect his fellow officer, but mostly, it seems, from a weariness born of seeing too many hopeless cases.

Pete seems ready to take revenge on Mike, and if this were a conventional Western, or even a conventional contemporary cop film, that’s the direction the film would take. Instead, Pete abducts Mike and brings him along on an odyssey to take Melquiades home.

Mr. Pepper’s Mike is a casual bigot and something of a slob; at first, the script seems slanted to make us root for Pete to exact some kind of vengeance. Instead, the characters work their way toward that rarest of movie rarities, a genuine valediction.

Because Mr. Jones’s film packs such unanticipated emotional power, critics are scrambling to name his influences; those most often cited are John Huston’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Sam Peckinpah’s films, particularly his 1974 contemporary Western,”Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.” Any film that begins, as this one does, with a coyote in the desert eating human flesh is probably going to draw comparisons to Peckinpah, though the image seems more like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.”

Yet for a film with such a grisly opening, “Three Burials” isn’t especially violent. It’s more about the consequences of violence and about going through hell (or at least purgatory) before finding one’s way home. Mr. Jones’s real influences would appear to be literary, the Faulkner of “As I Lay Dying” or the Flannery O’Connor of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” placed against the backdrop of a Larry McMurtry story – Mr. Jones, after all, has played a man who hauled a corpse a long way to a grave in Mr. Mc-Murtry’s “Lonesome Dove.”

With a title that will never fit on a cineplex marquee and a story whose richness and complexity can only be suggested but not conveyed in capsule reviews, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” is going to be a hard sell in a season dominated by blockbusters. Those who seek it out will remember it as the feature-film debut of the thinking man’s Clint Eastwood.