She's gotta have it: "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T."

Making a welcome return to UK screens this weekend, Leslie Harris's 1992 film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. was for some decades one of the lost texts of American independent and New Black Cinema: much acclaimed at Sundance (where it won the Special Jury Prize), briefly toured around the Western world (including Britain, where it was distributed by the late, lamented Metro Tartan), and thereafter confined to a dusty shelf in the Miramax vaults. Shot on a shoestring after the fashion of Spike Lee's early, breakthrough works, this is the fresh and freewheeling tale of Chantel (Ariyan A. Johnson), a whipsmart teenage New Yorker - the acronym of the title refers to a local rail network - who, between Ferris Bueller-like asides to camera, has to negotiate minimum-wage, convenience-store labour, babysitting her younger brothers, and the condescension of the men around her, from suitors with possessive tendencies to a headmaster who insists she "tone that mouth down". Harris, by pointed contrast, affords this character full voice. From an early stage, the film offers the joy of watching young performers who respond to one another as actual teenagers do - rudely, raucously, indifferent to how any grown-ups might tell them how to behave.

Issues will eventually encroach upon these frames - AIDS, the elevated deathrate among African-American men, and both pregnancy and abortion after Chantal succumbs to the dubious charms of some twit with a Jeep - but this remains first and foremost a film made about people and places, scenes and situations this director clearly knows; it wasn't trading in the lip service American movies have rather rotely come to pay, but real, vital representation. The tradeoff is with some occasionally rough-edged construction: the initial, winning sunniness gives way to still astonishing nihilism amid the kind of finale the Sundance Lab was set up to finesse. Still, rougher-edged independent films of this moment earned their (male) directors the keys to the castle - and there's an element of strategy in play that makes it even more surprising (and depressing) to discover Harris hasn't directed a feature since. Some of the limited resources here went towards a terrific early Nineties hiphop soundtrack that lends sequences a dynamism and energy whenever the performances wobble or the filmmaking syntax gets rudimentary. And the sparky Johnson, a sometime choreographer whose acting career looks to have petered out in the early Noughties, should really have become a postergirl the way Jada Pinkett and Angela Bassett did - but then Hollywood was subsequently more invested in providing us with three Chrises to choose between, and a Ryan for every occasion.

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. returns to selected cinemas from Friday.