One morning in the contemporary Romania depicted in Cristi Puiu’s 2001 film “Stuff and Dough,” which opens today at Film Forum, Ovidiu (Alexandru Papadopol), receives a rude awakening. Ivanov (Razvan Vasilescu), a local black marketeer, in the requisite Polo jacket and gold chains, has brought him a proposition. If Ovidiu will simply drive a leather bag with some innocent-sounding prescription drugs in it to a colleague in nearby Bucharest, Ivanov will pay him a tidy sum of cash.

Ovidiu, a young man balancing slacker instincts with budding entrepreneurship, is all ears. The part of him that wants to go back to bed on a couch beneath an Iron Maiden poster likes the idea of easy money. The part of him that sees a bright new future in which he has his own sundries kiosk, like the one his parents operate out of their home, could use the stake.

After gamely enduring a suffocating barrage of indiscreet, somewhat fatherly advice from Ivanov about bowel movements and personal hygiene, as well as his mother’s relentless quest to complicate the Bucharest trip with a shopping list of her own, it’s clear that Ovidiu is itching to spread his wings. “Two weeks tops and I’m out of here,” Ovidiu swears to his friend Vali (Dragos Bucur), who has agreed to go along for the ride, accompanied by his new girlfriend, Bety (Ioana Flora). With cell phone, drug bag, mom’s grocery list, and cash in hand, Ovidiu, Vali, and Bety hit the road.

And not a moment too soon. Until the trio climb into Vali’s rattling diesel delivery van, the film’s tight, handheld, naturally-lit shots and the sound (including a great deal of camera motor noise) of “Stuff and Dough” are so in the characters’ faces that it borders on the inhibiting. Anyone sensitive to faux-documentary camerawork and jump cuts has no business watching low-budget cinema from anywhere on the globe these days, least of all Romania. That country’s ostensible “new wave,” defined by Mr. Puiu’s second film, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” and other recent imports (such as Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”) is nothing if not visually rough-hewn. But the jump cut that introduces Ivanov, with his finger still busy inside a nostril, made me wish the film would move on and go wide, and I was relieved when it finally did.

Once out on the open highway, the young travelers’ small talk, radio fiddling, and natural silences take on a peculiarly cynical serenity. It’s as if they’re only really themselves when they’ve been tasked with someone else’s destination. Unfortunately, whatever it is they’re carrying is coveted by someone other than the person they’re carrying it to. A sudden violent encounter ramps up the urgency of their mission considerably. Nevertheless, as the three characters elude and re-encounter danger in the form of a red Jeep and its bat-wielding passenger, Ovidiu, Vali, and Bety remain realistically unheroic, honestly confused, and ingratiatingly naïve.

Like Jeff Nichols’s excellent “Shotgun Stories,” a recent American film that told a revenge story without stooping to catharsis, “Stuff and Dough” recasts a road movie game of cat-and-mouse as a zero-affect shrug-a-thon. By the standards of Steven Spielberg’s “Duel,” George Miller’s “Mad Max,” and other pumped-up, fleshed-out films of a similar circumstantial trajectory, “Stuff and Dough” is uneventful and anticlimactic to the extreme. That doesn’t make the film’s journey any less worthwhile, nor its ultimate lesson — that when traveling the economic frontiers of crime, there is no such thing as easy money or limited partnership — any less trenchant.

Through May 6 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).