It isn’t just Broadway that crawls with movie remakes and jokey spoofs — south of 14th Street, you’ll find plenty of kickboxing musicals or ironic takes on the gossip pages. And when shows aren’t guffawing, they’re desperately trying to echo Whitman’s primal scream, either with barbaric audience treatment or cheekily transgressive texts. While good work can emerge in either genre, it’s still a refreshing change to see Canadian theater group SaBooge ignoring the “hip” impulses and creating work so self-consciously lovely, sober, and sincere.

Without a whisker of cool-kid irony, “Every Day Above Ground” evokes the grisly life of Billy the Kid, his reprobate pals, and the man who shot him down. Actually, writer Jodi Essery has adapted “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” Michael Ondaatje’s celebrated chapbook of texts, songs, and partial witnessings, and so “history” stays at several steps remove. SaBooge, sifting Ondaatje’s sifted facts, does sometimes wind up with a product rather too fine — they succeed at mood and atmosphere so completely that they forget to give their piece an engine. But despite the occasional lulls (which are troublesome in a show only an hour long), “Every Day” casts a spell. Even days later, a viewer is still shaking loose from its grip, moments clinging to him like the dust of Billy’s world.

Director Adrienne Kapstein doesn’t waste a plug nickel on suspense. From the first image — Sheriff Pat Garrett (Graham Cuthbertson) cradling a dead Kid (Trent Pardy) — we know our antihero won’t ever be called Billy the Adult. But Garrett has pursued his quarry so long, he can scarcely stand to have him gone. Fishing around in the corpse’s ribs, he retrieves his silver bullet and stitches him back up. Now Billy, not dead and not living, stumbles back through his “Collected Works,” haunted by his victims and his friends, just so Garrett can hunt him down again.

On Billy’s travels, he meets the Picture Man (Attila Clemann), an itinerant photographer who has more than a whiff of sulfur about him. Bent on collecting images of “the famous and the dead,” the tin-typist knows that once he gets what he wants, the devil will sort out the rest. Mr. Pardy’s pitch-perfect, permanently adolescent Billy giggles at him — just like he giggles at everybody — but fame, not Garrett, will both kill the Kid and keep him alive.

Not every encounter works so well. Occasionally, an actor will rouse us from the show’s weird, sepia-toned drowse, drawing attention to the show’s basic motionlessness. Oddly enough, if they’d never shaken us, the show would have passed like a poisonous dream. But when Billy meets a man killed by his own dogs, the nightmarish incident actually serves to wake the audience up. When “Every Day Above Ground” works, it’s in the half-sleep state created by Ms. Kapstein’s seamless transitions and the performers’ boneless, otherworldly physicality. It’s only when we see the effort — as with Patrick Costello’s Tom overdoing the zombie bit — that we notice the play occasionally getting stuck in the sand.

The SaBooge world, however, never looks less than fantastic. The integration of Simon Harding’s timber-and-grit set with Jeff Lorenz’s spectacular sound-design is a winning combination — they can create phantoms out of a handful of dust and a minor chord. And the Lecoq trained company, just as it did in its 2005 production “Fathom,” moves as one body. Still, the collective needs to move beyond virtuosic atmospherics in order to create work of lasting impact. With “Every Day” they cock their pistols. With a genuine dramatic text buoying them up, they may someday shoot a bull’s-eye.

Until February 18 (150 First Ave. at East 9th Street, 212-477-5288).