All you need for a movie, Jean-Luc Godard notoriously said, “is a girl and a gun.” He’s got both in 1965’s “Pierrot le Fou,” the kind of existential caper that was definitive in and of the new wave of the mid-’60s, and of Mr. Godard, especially. The director pays homage to Picasso and Renoir — and that hot new petrochemical icon, the Esso Tiger — in fleeting glimpses, typically footnoted by one of his aphoristic asides. But it’s easy to see how critics could compare the pop-obsessed adventure in “Pierrot” to the bang-pow effect of a Roy Lichtenstein canvas. All that’s missing is the benday dots.

Instead, there’s Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, the quintessential French rogue who previously fell into a tragic affair with Jean Seberg in Mr. Godard’s “Breathless” (1960), which screens tonight and Thursday as a warmup for BAMcinématek’s 12-day run of “Pierrot.”

Presented in a newly struck print, “Pierrot le Fou” follows the Gallic hunk as a middle-class family man named Ferdinand (aka Pierrot) who runs off with his baby sitter Marianne (Ms. Karina) after she’s menaced by a pair of Algerian gangsters. Stolen cars are detonated. A Galaxie 500 is driven into the ocean. The lovers disappear into the countryside to live like castaways out of Robert Louis Stevenson. They make up stories to pay for their bar tabs. They fight. They sing. They kill.

Mr. Godard has stated that he began shooting without a script, and it’s easy to believe him. The film’s plot is less a “Bonnie and Clyde” saga than the idea of a “Bonnie and Clyde” saga, its ephemeral nature underscored by the manner in which the director handles exposition.

Much of the film advances through long, single shots of silent action, over which the two actors narrate fragments of dialogue. Arguably, Mr. Belmondo spends more screen time reciting from books than anything else — Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, among others — beginning from a lovely opening passage about Velásquez that he reads aloud in the bathtub. Mr. Godard’s appreciation of art history extends from 17th-century Spanish court painting to contemporary lingerie advertising. “It’s the age of ass,” Mr. Belmondo’s Ferdinand mutters, flipping past a derriere in a magazine.

As befits a getaway, “Pierrot” is light on its feet — a movie in the moment that suggests the director was as free as his characters wished to be. Mr. Godard litters the screen with formal jokes. Customers at a bar visited by the couple introduce themselves. One of them is the Hungarian actor and director László Szabó. Another is a 62-year-old man who identifies his occupation as “film extra.” In one of several comments on the then-escalating situation in Southeast Asia, Mr. Belmondo plays Ugly American to Ms. Karina’s Vietnamese version of Madame Butterfly in a skit performed to distract wayward American sailors from their money.

It now looks like an absurd bit of cartooning, but it’s perfectly true to this film’s unfettered spirit. Even though Mr. Godard was feuding with his wife, Ms. Karina, at the time, his camera lavishes her with affection. The film boasts one of the more reproduced images of the actress, waving a pair of scissors in front of her face as her hand sweeps past the frame (the implement soon winds up in the back of a mysterious, threatening midget). And lest we forget, no Godard film of the day would be complete without a shot of Ms. Karina doing a boogaloo in front of a jukebox. If that’s not the essence of 1960s French cinema, what is?

Well, this too:

Before he romps with Marianne through the countryside and down to the shore, Ferdinand visits a party lensed through filters in primary colors. He’s introduced to an American filmmaker who happens to be Sam Fuller. It’s no coincidence, of course, that the cigar-chomping auteur of “Steel Helmet” and “Shock Corridor” is given a cameo — the better to deliver another cherished, hard-boiled quip:

“Film is like a battleground,” Fuller says. “Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word: emotion.” And in three words: “Pierrot le Fou.”

Through June 26 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).