Robinson Devor’s Police Beat is sublime. Hailed by Kenneth Turan as Sundance “at its best,” the film is a heartbreaking footnote in the sordid recent history of regional American cinema: a labor of love shot on film in the creators’ American Northwest; hailed by critics; dismissed by distributors; screened on Beta SP a belated two years after its debut; by all accounts a fucking tragedy.

“Z”—a Senegalese immigrant turned Seattle bicycle cop—is distraught over his strained relationship. When his girlfriend ventures on a camping trip with her male roommate, the pangs of jealousy come upon the beat cop in a fever of melancholy. Through voice-over spoken in his native tongue of Wolof, Z reasons his mounting despair as Mr. Devor and co-writer Charles Mudede (an African immigrant and journalist who calls Seattle home) set him upon a series of disturbance calls taken directly from Mudede’s “Police Beat” column for the Seattle weekly The Stranger.

Mr. Devor is keen in conforming disparate styling here. Z’s voice-over, an interior monologue crafted with the appropriately erratic rhythm of consciousness, is an effective counterpoint to the blunt aesthetic of the police work. Reminiscent of Alan Clarke’s Elephant, these moments unfold in a vacuum of sorts, beginning and ending with a decided indifference to the film’s narrative.

Z is a swirling mess of emotions. Checking his voice-mail with the obsessive frequency of a psych ward manic, sleeping with the phone beside his ear, envisioning adulterous scenes of his erstwhile lover with the characters’ dialogue humorously dubbed in his Wolof voice-over, he struggles to fabricate a world capable of subduing the transgressions he dreads. He fails admirably. The result is a multi-tiered consciousness that layers Police Beat with a voice of absolute feeling. At the film’s emotional apex, Misters Devor and Mudede bring that feeling to a smoldering head.

In successive subtitles, Z’s interior musing states in Wolof:

My eyes are open.

What do I see?

I see a woman.

A foolish woman.

She does not understand she has said amazing things…

…to a man with a gun.

The evocation of murder where only agony and yearning have come before is a jolt to the heart. They are many in Police Beat, though none so crushing as the suffocating hell the marketplace imposed on this moving film.