Casting about late one night a couple weeks ago for a DVD which possessed some human substance but was also not imperative that I review immediately, I popped in John Sayles’ 1980 directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7, and found myself transported back to a time of considerably more hair, as well as discerning and engaging judgments about what it meant to be a childless thirtysomething couple — or, egads, even single — at the close of the 1970s.

Sayles, the writer-director behind such films as Passion Fish, Lone Star and Sunshine State, has been at the forefront of the independent film movement for almost a quarter-century — so long that it’s easy to forget that at the time of this release, there wasn’t actually much of a theatrical market for indie films, apart from a handful of four-walled special screenings. Predating The Big Chill by several years, Return of the Secaucus 7 covers some of the same terrain — old friends getting back together and all that — but is a more hopeful and in many ways honest portrayal of young adults grappling with the real world, and the changes it inherently brings for themselves and their relationships.

In the film, seven old friends (Mark Arnott, Karen Trott, Jean Passanante, Maggie Cousineau, Bruce McDonald, Adam Lefevre and Maggie Renzi) reunite a decade after their radical college days for a dramatic, poignant and revelatory weekend. It’s not necessarily pitched as a big-deal, capital-R reunion, though; they’ve been getting together, in various combinations, with new lovers and the like, each summer at the same cramped, small town New Hampshire house for the past several years. This time, though, there’s been a break-up by a longtime couple, which means the possibility of fresh romance for one guy, a would-be singer-songwriter. There’s also a couple of high school teachers, longtime steadies; a nurse; and a Senator’s speechwriter worried about how her pals, including an ex-flame, will respond to her slightly stuffy new boyfriend (Gordon Clapp).

Conversational charms abound, but Return of the Secaucus 7 scores — however fashion-dated and cramped its setting — mostly because it’s honest about friends’ judgments of one another (e.g., “I love him, but he’s a fuck-up”) while also nailing the tinged but not always emotionally overblown differences in communication between men and women, and the slight manifestations of classism present in the way young parents interact with singletons, and townies with those who’ve moved away to bigger cities. Mostly, watching the movie, one gets a sense of Sayles’ affection for the commingling of careful planning and found, on-the-fly delights. While some story strands are more interesting than others, and the performances range from amateurish to engagingly naturalistic (an almost comically younger-looking David Strathairn pops up, proving definitively that he wasn’t cultivated in arrested middle-age from Sam Waterston’s rib), Return of the Secaucus 7 grows on you as an ensemble piece because of the recognizability and relatability of its subjects.

Housed in a regular Amaray case, Return of the Secaucus 7 is presented in 1.33:1 full screen (more on this in a moment), with a Dolby digital soundtrack and a feature-length audio commentary track from Sayles. Anyone who’s ever talked to, read or listened to an interview with Sayles knows that the guy is erudite, knows his shit, but is also — with just a little proper coaxing — an affable “guy’s guy,” and that combination makes this commentary track among the most informative that I’ve listened to recently. He talks a lot about the movie’s five-week, 16mm 1979 location shoot, but also finds a way to interweave specific anecdotal details (horses in the background of one shot, for instance) into broader points that inform the body of his work — like how to take advantage of “production design already done for you,” as he puts it, or avoid ADR looping, especially with children or actors working with an accent.

Without seeming to work from notes, Sayles’ memory is sharp. He explains in reasonable fashion how — at a time before the Sundance Film Festival — he felt it was inconceivable that Return of the Secaucus 7 would be seen by a wide audience in theaters, so it was composed for television, which leads to plenty of pan-and-scan scars in its DVD presentation. He also gives good anecdotes; a dead deer that appears roadside in the film is made up of a mounted deer head and a duffle bag stuffed full of clothes. At around the one-hour mark, Sayles finally touches on explicit comparisons to The Big Chill, but for most of the time he talks generously and intelligently about his collaborators (including composer Mason Daring), his own small supporting role, the film’s themes, its production, and how it fits in with his other work. Oh! He also talks about the copious male asses on display in the movie’s skinny-dipping sequence (a tweaking of female-nudity conventions, he argues, but one that doesn’t entirely hold water, within the narrative), noting, tongue-in-cheek, “I believe this was the last time I appeared naked in one of my own films.” Finally, there’s also a trailer for Sayles’ Casa de los Babys and a 12-minute featurette which cross-cuts film clips with addtional sit-down reminiscences from Sayles and his longtime partner, actress-producer Renzi. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B (Disc)