I left a recent matinee of “Queen & Slim,” the mesmerizing new outlaw romance directed by Melina Matsoukas, astonished on two levels. The film itself kept me rapt; I cried through the end and left the theater with the dazed, disoriented feeling you get when a movie makes you momentarily forget everything else in your life. But as amazed as I was by the experience of watching the film, I was equally amazed that it got made at all.

“Queen & Slim” is about a black man and a black woman — we don’t learn their real names until the very end — who, following a desultory first date, get caught in a traffic stop that goes hideously wrong. The policeman who pulls them over becomes needlessly aggressive, and when Queen, a defense attorney, tries to record him with her phone, he shoots her. In the scuffle that follows, the cop is killed, and the couple, their fates suddenly soldered together, go on the run.

From the title on, the film invites comparisons to Hollywood classics like “Bonnie and Clyde” and, especially, “Thelma & Louise.” (It can’t be a coincidence that the fugitives in “Queen & Slim,” like those in “Thelma & Louise,” spend much of the film in a flashy vintage turquoise car.) Producing those earlier movies, both subversive in different ways, was famously difficult. A studio executive reportedly complained about the “Thelma & Louise” screenplay, “Two bitches in a car. I don’t get it.”

I’d have guessed that the path for “Queen & Slim" — a film steeped in the politics of Black Lives Matter and helmed by a first-time director who is a woman of color — would have been even more difficult.