Matt Porterfield has been making some noise in the world of independent filmmaking as someone who’s trying to tell a story differently.

If you see Porterfield’s latest, “Putty Hill,” at Film Streams’ Ruth Sokolof Theater on Saturday night at 7 p.m., you can talk to him personally afterward in an audience talkback about what he’s attempting in the way he tells a story.

He’ll also appear after a one-time-only, 1 p.m. Sunday screening of his earlier feature, “Hamilton,” to talk with the audience.

“I’m interested to see how these films play in the middle of the country,” Porterfield said last week from his home in Hamilton, a northeast Baltimore suburb not far from Putty Hill. “I’m looking forward to the conversations after the screening.”

“Putty Hill” begins and ends in a bare room with a mattress in the corner, newspapers scattered on the floor. From there it shifts to some young people playing paintball in a wooded area.

One long-haired teen, defeated in the game, removes his mask and begins answering questions from an unknown, unseen interviewer. The other players, he says, are friends of his brother, Cory. Cory died last week. Overdose. The funeral is tomorrow.

And so it goes. We get a series of settings, each with characters doing ordinary everyday things. Some are introduced to us through this interviewer. All are somehow related to Cory. Gradually we piece together a community, partly solving a mystery simply by watching.

Are these actors? What’s real here?

Porterfield’s movie, combining documentary and narrative-fiction techniques, isn’t for everybody. In particular, it’s not for the action-thriller crowd that needs lots of things happening every minute, or for the folks who go to the movies to be entertained and want stories wrapped up neatly at the end.

In fact, “Putty Hill” doesn’t so much tell a story as depict a working-class way of life in a particular Baltimore suburb — the suburb in which Porterfield grew up.

He’s after mood, milieu, atmosphere. And a particular way of representing people who don’t normally show up in movies. People like those he grew up with.

“This is an intergenerational community of people either working multiple jobs, or in the process of looking for work, unemployed or underemployed,” he said. “They’re largely white, working-class, living on the perimeter of the city where there isn’t public transit or other amenities many city dwellers have. There’s an overall lack of education, and a struggle to find meaning in life. Many don’t have strong parental figures or mentors.”

It’s a world of ex-cons and tattoo parlors, old cars that might have rust or a different-colored door, graffiti, skateboarders and potheads, grass growing in the cracks of the sidewalks. A torn screen flapping in the breeze through a door.

“I was trying to figure out a way to make a film that acknowledges my relationship to the material but also avoids conventions I think romanticize or distance the subject from the audience,” Porterfield said.

There was no script, just a five-page treatment. The movie was quickly thrown together on a $23,000 budget after funding fell through for another movie Porterfield had been trying to make, “Metal Gods.”

“It felt like a waste of energy not to try and shoot something in the summer of 2009,” he said. “We’d been casting for over a year, 500 auditions. I found a number of people I wanted to see onscreen. They were the foundation for a free-er, more open narrative film. I began to imagine scenes in precise locations. A young man’s death is the narrative device that ties the scenes together.”

A tattoo artist at work talks about his dead nephew. Dustin, the guy he’s tattooing, did time in prison with Cory. A cousin, Jenny, is in town from California for the funeral, staying with her estranged dad (the tattooist). Cory’s sister, Zoe, who lives with her mom in Delaware, is also here, hanging with young girlfriends. They visit Cory’s grandma. Dustin’s brother, a skateboarder, also talks about his pal Cory. And most of them end up at the wake the next day. The dialogue is improvised.

Through all of them, a portrait of Cory and of the world he came from emerges. There is an affection for these characters, expressed without sentimentality but with respect.

“I wanted to see conflict portrayed in ways other than words,” Porterfield said. “There’s a tradition of having everybody talk about things onscreen. I see potential in gestures, movements, lighting design, color, to convey mood and everything that could encapsulate.”

From the outside, he said, Putty Hill is a banal stretch of 1950s bungalows in an old suburb. “Dig deeper, and you find people struggling.”

The Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert gave “Putty Hill” 3.5 stars and a rave review. Mark Jenkins of the Washington Post panned it at 1.5 stars. I’m somewhere between the two.

See what you think. The movie is booked for two weeks at Film Streams.