Preston Miller’s Jones offers an outsider’s perspective on contemporary New York rarely seen on film, and almost never acknowledged by natives. As the camera tracks star Trey Albright strolling the streets in real time, through neon-overlit Times Square and streetlamp-orange midtown side streets, Miller transforms some of the most personality-devoid sections of the city into a kind of paradise of anonymity. Times Square may be a sanitized tourist trap to you and me, but in Jones, it’s a blank screen for an actual tourist’s fantasies of liberation.

Opening tomorrow night for a one-week run at the Pioneer Theater in New York, Jones is the kind of lo-fi, no budget, non-traditional narrative that, without the support of a festival like SXSW, has an extremely difficult time making waves. But Miller finds a few ingenious ways around his limitations, and the unprofessional look of the video is actually one of my favorite things about it. It’s shifty and unstable and, particularly in the eerie brightness it captures on real NYC streets, never film-like but often very pretty.

The film follows two nights in the life of the titular character, a youngish father-to-be who takes advantage of an undemanding business trip to unleash his id. In town from South Carolina to videotape an insurance deposition, Jones calls his wife and tells her that his plan is to have a couple of drinks, and then maybe go see a Haruki Murakam lecture. Within 15 minutes, he’s broken his promise to not buy a pack of cigarettes; soon after that, he’s passed out drunk on the F train. Drinking, whoring, and general desperate carousing ensues. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t make it to the lecture.

It’s a relatively unflinching portrait of a drunken night full of mistakes, and watching it is as uncomfortable as it sounds. Miller is painfully painstaking in breaking down the sad little landmarks of such an evening: the fumbling attempts to get into an ATM vestibule; the conversations with strangers that begin with hostility and soon become too intimate, to the point where they’re eventually spied on by curious, envious on lookers; the regrettable end-of-night journeys in vain pursuit of getting laid.

Is this Jones’ last lost weekend? A final gasp of self-indulgence, before his baby’s born and he admits defeat to domesticity? Or is this a preview of what’s to come? Almost throughout, the camera stays relatively far away, as though it’s as important that we see where Jones is as what he’s doing. The joke is that contemporary New York could never induce such depravity—the city is Jones’ excuse. In a post-9/11, post-Bloomberg New York that’s been washed clean of sleaze for the protection of outsiders, those outsiders have to smuggle in their own demons behind a mild-mannered, commerce-friendly veneer.

The Jones website claims that “due to the graphic nature of this film, mature audiences only” will be admitted; it’s a come-on, but it also cleverly positions the film as a throw back to the kind of sleaze that used to be much easier to find in this city. Or so I’ve heard.