Jim Jarmusch’s films often bring to mind Gertrude Stein’s famous dismissal of Oakland, California: There’s no “there” there. Among all the American directors of note to emerge since 1980, Mr. Jarmusch has crafted a body of work that turns most decisively on fractal glimmers of nuance — anti-narratives that seem to arise out of someone’s peripheral vision, carried by a dynamic that’s like a coin toss. Heads, it’s profound. Tails, ephemeral.

That sensibility has evolved over the director’s 25-year career, which has been comic even when waxing visionary (as in 1995’s “Dead Man” and 1999’s “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai”). But its strongest evocation remains “Stranger Than Paradise,” the 1984 film that marked Mr. Jarmuch’s breakthrough and became a landmark in the American independent cinema movement — a movement that would soon spawn Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It,” Roger Moore’s “Roger & Me,” Richard Linklater’s “Slacker,” Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” as well as the dual cultural phenomena that would become Sundance and Miramax.

Before all that, there was this oddball little movie, littered with blackout strips like a 1920s silent reel and graced with succinct dialogue that could fit on an interstitial frame. Eddie (Richard Edson) says it best, standing with his buddy Willie (John Lurie), kicking snow between railroad tracks in the middle of a Cleveland winter: “You know, it’s funny. You come to someplace new and everything looks just the same.”

Mr. Jarmusch, an Akron, Ohio, native, centered his deadpan take on the road movie with this pair of downtown New York hipsters, who sport fedoras and thrift-shop cardigans, lighting out for the territory only to discover that the land of the free is curiously depopulated, a limbo of hot dog stands, sci-fi movies glowing from ancient TV sets, and faded motel neon. As the pals trail Willie’s Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) to Ohio, and then take her along for a holiday at the South Florida dog tracks, they could be using Robert Frank’s road map. It may be the early 1980s, but it feels like 1955.

Back in circulation as a new double-DVD package from Criterion, “Paradise,” for all its pop-culture significance, is as relevant as ever. Mr. Jarmusch, who, in the late 1970s, found himself at New York University film school (despite lacking any prior film experience), played in a no-wave-era band (the Del Byzanteens), and befriended Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders, made a more site-specific film with his 1980 debut, “Permanent Vacation” (included here as a bonus). It captures the bombed-out, graffiti-covered landscape of the East Village that was a backdrop for other filmmakers, such as Susan Seidelman (“Smithereens”), Amos Poe (“The Blank Generation”), and Beth B. (“Vortex”). True, Mr. Jarmusch cast musicians from the same CBGB/Mudd Club/Pyramid Lounge demimonde that fueled those efforts. Mr. Edson drummed for Sonic Youth. Mr. Lurie, who also composed the elegant, melancholy, Bartók-like chamber score for “Stranger Than Paradise,” led the “fake-jazz” ensemble the Lounge Lizards. Ms. Balint was part of the Hungarian expatriate collective the Squat Theater. But the genius of “Paradise” is that it doesn’t look anything like an early-’80s, punk-influenced period piece.

What it still looks like, as critics have surely suggested in the mountain of references the film inspired, is an episode of “The Three Stooges” staged by Samuel Beckett — a happy byproduct of the single, stationary shot that frames each scene and the vintage, pulpy lingo the characters affect. It can also be read as an American response to the red-state excursions by German new-wave auteurs such as Werner Herzog (whose 1977 “Stroszek” may well have kick-started the heartland infatuation that hit its zenith with “Blue Velvet”) and Mr. Wenders (“Alice in the Cities”), whose gift of leftover film stock became the introductory reel in the triptych of “Paradise.”

As Mr. Jarmusch put it, in his deadpan inflection, the work was conceived as a “semi-neorealist black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European film director obsessed with Ozu and familiar with the 1950s American television show ‘TheHoneymooners.'”

He’s kidding. Sort of. “Stranger Than Paradise” looks like that. Yet, for all its underpinnings, the movie is an utter original — a situation comedy lacking a situation, its punch lines as elliptical and implied as the beats between the notes in a Thelonious Monk solo. Mr. Jarmusch’s pleasurable interpretation of minimalism is such that all moments are mundane, yet every moment is meaningful. The uncanny desolation of a Florida state line visitor’s center, with a happy orange face beaming from a mural by the highway; Ms. Balint’s interrogating of Mr. Lurie over his TV dinner: “What is this meat?” And her instant grasp of hep argot (for 1950) when Mr. Lurie complains about her affection for Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, whose sepulchral yowl, “You Put a Spell on Me,” seems to be the only music she listens to. “Screamin’ Jay Hawkins is my main man. So don’t bug me!”

Independent film has become its own, often bloated, cottage industry since those dark and wild days before Harvey Weinstein, just as the Manhattan of Mr. Jarmusch’s youth has become a place where it is almost prohibitively difficult to shoot a no-budget feature — legally, at least. Beyond its more obvious themes, the film is an unintended reminder that, these days, there’s barely any “there” here.