Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” and writer-director of “Cat People,” “American Gigolo” and “Light of Day” never really went away. But this most spiritual, Calvinist and cerebral filmmaker had his years in the wilderness.

Making a movie with Brett Easton Ellis and Lindsay Lohan (“The Canyons”) is as close to a trial by Satan as the cinema gets.

Every longtime fan had reason to hope he’d have the comeback that “First Reformed” afforded. For some, it was “Mishima” or “Hardcore” or “Afflication” that was the basis of that faith. For me, his serene, sinister classic “Light Sleeper” (1992) was the form I hoped he’d recapture.

It’s about upscale drug dealing in Manhattan, with an ex-addict/dealer (Willem Dafoe) writing and narrating his daily life and musings about his limited “future,” about guilt and responsibility in a brutally amoral and classist city where only the classiest are the clients of Ann (Susan Sarandon), Robert (David Clennon) and John “Jack, Johnny” LeTour (Dafoe).

A rich and connected Barnard College coed overdoses, and all of a sudden the cops might be noticing who this trio are, and what they’re selling.

LeTour — a made-up name — is our narrator and title character, a “Light Sleeper” who patrols the city in a Town Car, a well-turned out “delivery boy” with a pass through every VIP rope and every upscale apartment lobby to serve the well-heeled,. “White drugs for white people” Ann chortles.

LeTour can’t sleep. So he fills notebooks with his musings about his sleeplessness.

“It’s worse when I’m off,” he narrates. “I just walk and walk.”

He’s uncertain about his future, and emulating his flakey boss (Sarandon), he visits a psychic (Mary Beth Hurt) for direction. She tells him “A woman close to you, she will betray you.”

He doesn’t trust Ann, and neither do we. But he’s got a fresh distraction. He’s spotted an ex (Dana Delany) in town. She’s years sober. He’s two years “clean.” And her protests notwithstanding, LeTour attempts to ingratiate himself back into her good graces. He’s got a million questions about where she’s been and what she’s doing.

“I don’t want you to know about my life.”

Schraeder immerses us in this world, letting the camera settle on Dafoe’s face as he rides and rides and stops and makes warm exchanges, even looking out for clients who seem to be entering a death spiral.

“I’m not gonna put you in the emergency room.”

LeTour has a conscience. His silences and his writing, even if he tosses each notebook he fills, makes him seem soulful. Will Marianne let this reminder of her addicted past back into her life?

A very young Sam Rockwell plays a fellow dealer. David Spade, fresh off “Saturday Night Live,” plays a chatterbox coke customer. Victor Garber (“Titanic,” TV’s “Alias,” many other series) plays a rich and trusted European expat client, Tis.

Schraeder gets at the terminal allure of drugs and the romance of addiction in scenes where LeTour tries to reconnect with barely-sober Marianne. Addicts only remember “the good times.”

“I envy you,” she sighs. “Convenient memory is a gift from God.”

That relationship is the sentimental soul of “Light Sleeper.” But the brittle connection between LeTour and Ann is the heart of the movie. He’s paranoid. She’s charming, but self-serving and smart enough to know she’s got to have a Plan B. Might LeTour’s destruction be a part of that?

I saw this movie on my first trip to New York, and what’s striking about it now is its unerring grasp of that era, the character of the city then — laws flouted, the well-connected always connecting, an Orthodox Jew not judging Ann or allowing a guilty thought as he counts her cash for her, shortcut-taking cops, the trash-piles of a sanitation workers’ strike cluttering familiar, grungy and underlit streets.

It’s a near perfect snapshot of New York at the end of the Reagan Era, in the middle of the cocaine boom, when crack had flooded the downmarket, bringing in customers that Anna, LeTour and Robert would never cater to.

Delany, Sarandon, Clennon and Garber make sharp, lived-in impressions.

But Dafoe, high on the list of best actors never to win an Oscar, was at his very best in this portrait of a loner who starts to take stock of “the life” at 40. This is a nuanced portrait of a not-wholly-recovered addict who has let street smarts displace his ambition and education, a guy whose options and horizons are so limited he thinks consulting a psychic will offer a way out.

No wonder he can’t sleep.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Dana Delany, David Clennon, Sam Rockwell, Jane Adams, Victor Garber and Mary Beth Hurt.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Schraeder. A Seven Arts/New Line release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time 1:43