很久以前他是导演r of the Oscar-winning film “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins wasliving in San Franciscoworking atBanana Republicand dreaming of making a movie.

After a shift of receiving shipments and unpacking boxes, Jenkins would head to a cafe to write. When some friends offered him $15,000 and asked if he could make a movie for that amount, he immediately said he could.

The movie he came up with,“Medicine for Melancholy,”shot in 2007, released in 2008 and out this month on a beautifulCriterion Collection Blu-ray, is the tale of two young Black bohemians who hang out the day after a one-night stand, walking around the city and discussing issues big and small. Jenkins, inspired by a recent breakup as well as Claire Denis’ 2002 French film“Friday Night”and Richard Linklater’s“之前”films, portrays alate-aughts San Franciscoin the throes of gentrification.

“The feeling of the city at this time — I’d been in San Francisco for three or four years — and as a young Black person, there was this energy you could feel in the city,” Jenkins says in a commentary track recorded earlier this year for the Criterion release. “There’s something absolutely stunning about the city, about the way you can physically move through the city. And this microaggressive way the city felt antagonistic to Blackness, and to impoverished people.”

The film, he says, was “my preoccupation with being Black in a city that feels like it’s doing everything it can to remove Blackness; of me wanting to make a film about having a broken heart.”

Many of the themes of “Medicine for Melancholy” would resurface a decade later in Joe Talbot’s“The Last Black Man in San Francisco,”when gentrification and rising home and rent prices were even worse. Jenkins wryly notes that he shared a SoMa apartment with a co-worker, something that would be unlikely today.

“Thinking of making this film in 2007, and all the many things that have happened in San Francisco since this film was made, I don’t know if two kids working at a Banana Republic could afford to share an apartment and live in the city,” Jenkins says.

Above all, “Medicine for Melancholy” is about two people in their 20s and the city they inhabit. Micah (Wyatt Cenac, a comedian who later was a correspondent and writer for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”) is an aquarium installer who lives in a tiny apartment in the Tenderloin. Jo’ (Tracey Heggins) is an art curator who lives — with her out-of-town boyfriend — in the Marina district.

Their day also takes them from the Castro to Noe Valley, to the Museum of the African Diaspora, Yerba Buena Gardens and a ride on the LeRoy King Carousel at the Children’s Creativity Museum, and a night of dancing atthe Knockoutin the La Lengua neighborhood south of the Mission District. They even check out each other’s Myspace profiles.

“Medicine for Melancholy” was made during an era when micro-budgeted films — movies that cost less than $100,000, and many far less than that — were common on the festival and art house circuit. It was the time of the so-called mumblecore movement, which included Andrew Bujalski’s “Funny Ha Ha” and Joe Swanberg’s “Hannah Takes the Stairs” and “Nights and Weekends,” the latter co-directed by its star, Greta Gerwig (“Barbie”).

Jenkins was from Miami and went to film school at Florida State University. After spending a frustrating few years in Los Angeles as a production assistant, he fell in love with a woman who lived in San Francisco, so he moved north. When they broke up and Jenkins was determined to make a film, he called many of his friends from film school.

Cinematographer James Laxton and editor Nat Sanders would also work with Jenkins on“Moonlight”(2016), which won the Academy Award for best picture, and“If Beale Street Could Talk”(2018).

Although the film can be rented or purchased on major streaming platforms, the Criterion Blu-ray is the way to go. It has two fascinating commentaries, one from 2008 as well as the recent one, and it’s interesting to hear a young and excited Jenkins versus the 43-year-old veteran filmmaker looking back 15 years. The Blu-ray also features a making-of documentary, outtakes, an essay by author and critic Danielle Amir Jackson, and a restored image from the original high-definition master approved by Jenkins and Laxton.

The coronavirus pandemic, of course, has radically changed San Francisco. “Medicine for Melancholy” serves as a heartfelt time capsule, even if that San Francisco also had its problems.

At one point, Micah says, “I love this city. I hate this city, but I love this city. San Francisco’s beautiful. You shouldn’t have to be upper class to be a part of that.”

In a sense, we are all Micah, don’t you think?

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@BRFilmsAllen