The Bowery, on New York’s Lower East Side, is an indelible part of the city’s mythology, for decades the home of literally thousands of homeless men. The astonishing 1957 film “On the Bowery,” playing this weekend at Anthology Film Archives, brings this piece of history and human existence to immediate, vivid life — from flophouses and bottles of “sneaky-pete” to Bowery Mission sermons and hand-to-mouth day-laboring. It’s a landmark of urban realism and independent filmmaking, and one of the essential New York movies.

Filmmakers have hawked street grit and banged out cinema manifestos for ages, but Lionel Rogosin’s innovative chronicle strikes a true chord. It’s an irreducible document of places, faces, chatter, and knocked-down (and knocked-back) spirits. “This is film — filmmaking which is visualized, which expresses the place and its people and which in essence is not written,” the director, who died in 2000, wrote of his approach. The pioneering effort was even nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar in 1958 — despite not being a documentary in the traditional sense.

In fact, “On the Bowery” was an experiment in improvised drama and “found scenes” with a cast of nonprofessionals (one an alcoholic who died soon after its shooting). The episodic tale of an itinerant rail man who comes to town looking for day work provides a loose framework for Rogosin’s mission, which was to burrow out a reality from the inside, even if the delivery varied in the hands of nonactors. Instead of trying to force pity out of the viewer, the director let the milieu speak for itself and elicited a natural, fraternal compassion.

Fraternity, of a sort, is crucial to the film’s slice of life. The tippling rail man, with nothing more to his name than a battered suitcase, falls in with a pot-bellied old-timer who gives tips about flopping and pawning. Later, the canny oldster swipes the suitcase when the newcomer passes out drunk on the street, but the two continue to cross paths and share muscatel afterward. Easy come, easy go, and the theft comes to seem a local corrective to getting too comfortable.

Tuning in and out of these particular characters, Rogosin’s camera captures the dives and curbside clutter of the Bowery, human and otherwise. Men mill about outside bars; one shot shows a few curled up in sleep in a childlike row of fetal positions. The spare tables and chairs inside, squinting in sunlight but already well populated, contrast with the street’s vertical tangle of shop shingles and elevated railways (long since demolished).

The gin joints have names like “Majestic Bar” (246 Bowery, today a “martial-arts supplies” store) and “Confidence Bar and Grill” (254, rubble). The rail man’s longest night out takes place in one of them, full of clattery boozy bonhomie, mumbles, and arguments. Plunging us into the moment, Rogosin doesn’t press for humor or pathos as he catches the ravaged denizens enjoying themselves in clusters around the tables.

The rail man’s down-and-out path takes him to the Bowery Mission (which is amazingly extant today, albeit dwarfed by neighboring scaffolding). The temperance-flavored deal is simple: Hear out the preacher and get a spot on the floor for the night, on the condition of total sobriety. It looks like a temporary solution, and a bargain at that, but his thirst drives him out, encapsulating the churn of his life.

Rogosin’s fine-grained sense of the milieu grew out of undercover research and discreet filming techniques. (Not from personal experience: The Yale chemistry grad ran part of his father’s textile concern before turning to filmmaking and opening the fabled Bleecker Street Cinema.) The technical accomplishment earned praise from Variety at the time, and as much as Rogosin’s efforts look back to Neorealism, the stirrings of cinema verité curiosity are present as well.

Rogosin, who would make just a few more films after “Bowery,” went on to use similar methods for his clandestine record of apartheid, 1960’s “Come Back, Africa” (which screened at Anthology last spring). “On the Bowery,” although made first, is the stronger film, and an unflinching exposé in its own way. Anthology presents a 35 mm restoration from the Cineteca di Bologna (which made its premiere at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival). It’s a fitting venue for a work whose maker was lauded at the time by Anthology founder Jonas Mekas and who deserves greater renown.

Through Sunday (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).