Spike Lee remains under-recognized as one of America’s irreplaceable directors, even after his 2006 crowd-pleaser “Inside Man,” but when it came to his debut, people voted with their feet. “She’s Gotta Have It,” his self-destructing 1986 romantic comedy, set the script for an earlier wave of profitable independent crossovers with its 12-day shoestring production shot in black-and-white by a young film-school graduate.

Fierce, sexy, and funny, “She’s Gotta Have It,” which finally arrives on DVD today thanks to MGM, garnered praise when it opened, but also some of the condescending suspicion that dogs Mr. Lee’s frank efforts today. Like the movie’s self-assured characters, who look right into the camera and deliver considered monologues, the director tends to stare right at an ugly mess or a knotty trauma when most people can’t even imagine how to discuss it, or would prefer to opt out.

The brilliant, riotous cinema that was “Do the Right Thing” (1989), for example, exploded onto screens during one of our city’s most racially charged eras, while “The 25th Hour” (2002) cast a somber, tortured gaze over the gaping wound of ground zero. With his multi-part documentary for HBO, “When the Levees Break” (2006), Mr. Lee lent a beautifully harmonized voice to the sufferers of a criminally marginalized national tragedy. And as for the layered race and media satire of “Bamboozled” (2002), which New Line Pictures didn’t even begin to know how to market, it awaits rediscovery in, well, probably another country, or century. “She’s Gotta Have It” initially seems far afield from these experiences. The spirited courtship of Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a vivacious graphic artist, by three different men yields the articulate game-playing of an “offbeat” will-she-or-won’t-she comedy. That feel, as well as the lived-in New York locations, unfakeable as only a Brooklyn-lover could choose them, led to improbable contemporary comparisons with Woody Allen.

But Mr. Lee’s portrait of the sexually liberated Nola — don’t call her a freak! — emerges as an unsettled, fractured character study, a “Rashomon”-like peek from the command posts of different kinds of masculinity. And the men inaugurate Mr. Lee’s characteristic, misunderstood flaunting and mixing of type and individual: the snobbish and vain beefcake model, Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell), a mouthpiece for inflammatory class slurs; the hilarious, barely employed jive artist Mars Blackmon (Mr. Lee himself), and the prime contender, Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks), a plainspoken middle-class lover whose romantic poems sound like affidavits.

As all three vie for sole ownership of Nola’s heart, she defiantly testifies to her independence, but eventually the fracas manages to make her ill at ease with her own sexuality and carefree approach to life. Even someone safe like Jamie, who organizes a surprise dance performance in Fort Greene Park for Nola’s birthday (shot in glorious color), will break her trust and worse when she is at her most vulnerable.

Nola’s predicament, or that of any woman in her position, gives “She’s Gotta Have It” a broader appeal than Mr. Lee’s follow-up, “School Daze,” which is set in the thorny byways of a black college. But the former’s Brooklyn milieu is indelibly specific: Home base is Nola’s loft and grandiose bed in a space near Fulton Ferry; Jamie first spots Nola on the Fulton Market drag, and Mars’s brash nerd street cred is backed up by his ever-present Brooklyn Bridge backdrop. (And when it comes to time and place, Mr. Lee knows the precise value of a Knicks memory delivered in rapid-fire narration by Mars, who later tosses out a vintage ’80s New York fire starter: “What do you know, you’re a Celtics fan!”)

Like fellow NYU graduate Jim Jarmusch (“Stranger Than Paradise”), Mr. Lee flaunts his 16 mm black-and-white (shot by Ernest Dickerson) palette with sunbleached exteriors, soft-limned faces, and a sensual chiaroscuro for a blissful sex scene. A few jazzistic photo montages break up the movie, charging the fluid feel with the casual cool of Bill Lee’s score. Varied rhythms and contours also arise out of the characters themselves, including Mars’s call-and-response pestering (soon to appear in Nike ads), Greer’s imperious hectoring, and Jamie’s measured baritone.

The vexed jaunts of “She’s Gotta Have It” bear the seeds of a career that offers more than meets — or smacks — the eye. In sentiments tucked into the credits, Mr. Lee made clear where he stood: “No jheri curls and no drugs,” shouts one line, while the crew is provocatively listed as the “Means of Production.” Ever independent and uncompromising, Mr. Lee’s voice has remained loud and clear.