Gus Van Sant’s 1985 debut feature, “Mala Noche,” takes us back to a refreshingly scrappy moment in the adventuresome director’s career. Long before his current phase of highly conceptual works like “Elephant” and “Last Days,” Mr. Van Sant self-financed this affecting lo-fi take on unrequited love between a young white store clerk and a Mexican drifter. The black-and-white film, which tells a story driven by lust but defined by longing, begins a welcome week-long revival today at the IFC Center.

Walt (Tim Streeter) mans the counter at a skid-row liquor store in Portland, Ore. When Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), a shaggy-haired teenager, steps through the door and into the light of a hanging lamp, it’s infatuation at first sight. Walt, too amorous to wait, tracks him down afterward and offers him cash for sex. Rebuffed, he soon takes up with Johnny’s brooding friend Roberto (Ray Monge). “That’s about as close to Johnny as I’ll ever get,” he says in the plainspoken voice-over.

Adapted from the novella by Portland poet Walt Curtis, “Mala Noche” ambles along with an episodic, sometimes impressionistic account of Walt’s lovelorn pursuit: scaling the wrong boardinghouse window in search of Johnny, proxy sex with Roberto, and perilous joy-rides with both on country roads.

“Mala Noche” translates to “bad night,” which evokes a melancholic mood (backed up by spare country guitar licks) rather than a sense of menace. Similarly, John Campbell’s noirish photography casts characters in expressive darkness, by turns mischievous, becalmed, and seductive. Shadows after hours and under-lit apartments give everyone’s face places to hide. Days glow dimly in sunlit grays in true Portland fashion.

As for the light of Walt’s life, Johnny disappears for much of the movie. We never get too close to either teenager, since our view is filtered through Walt’s initially narrow interest in them. He speculates, sometimes foolishly, about the gulf between them — racial, economic, sexual — and imagines how the two must mock him. But he also nurtures a touchingly gallant devotion, prostrating himself before Johnny to prove his passion and nursing Roberto through an illness.

Beside the disconnected love triangle, Walt keeps busy wrangling hobos at the liquor store and sizing up who can buy on credit. Here and at the boarding house, “Mala Noche” features head-on dialogue shots that produce nice quick-sketch portraits in the high-contrast black-and-white.

“Mala Noche” might appeal to viewers turned off by the director’s later style of filmmaking, which embraces elaborate tracking shots and resists a straightforward narrative. The grim material of “Elephant” and “Last Days” can leave one longing to engage with lives that are not lived under an unremitting gaze, no matter how nonjudgmental or ambiently spiritual. “Mala Noche,” aided by its diaristic voice and shoestring budget, feels comfortingly intimate.

Ever the independent mind, Mr. Van Sant followed “Mala Noche” by depicting resourceful addicts in 1989’s “Drugstore Cowboy” and casting teen heartthrobs River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves as hustlers in 1991’s “My Own Private Idaho.” “Mala Noche” and his best work succeed because his interest in marginalized characters feels humane and matter-of-fact (though “Elephant,” which depicted a Columbine-like high school massacre, famously led him into controversy).

“Mala Noche” is the first of several features that Mr. Van Sant set in Portland, his adopted hometown. That includes “Paranoid Park,” his latest and, by some accounts, most accomplished work, which screened last week at Cannes. As we await the new film’s distribution, “Mala Noche” is here to tide us over with its poignant, raggedly poetic vision.

Through June 7 at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).