‘I see a big beautiful Soviet feeling being born here …” This is what a teenage poet called Lenka gleefully announces when she realises that her friend Vera is in love. She is the little Vera of the title, which can ambiguously mean “a little faith” or “little faith”. The feeling that’s being born isn’t particularly big or or even very Soviet. But it might be beautiful.

The 1988 film Little Vera – to be revived in London – was a commercial hit, helped by its startling amount of nudity and sex. It was a triumph for its director Vasili Pichul and screenwriter Mariya Khmelik, who was Pichul’s wife, quickly renowned as the key perestroika movie, whose openness to westernised thrills of sex and rock’n’roll (no drugs, though) made it a key text of the times.

Vera, played by Natalya Negoda, is a liberated teenager, who has trendy makeup and hairstyle in the style of Debbie Harry, and takes a frank and uncomplicated pleasure in sex. She is rebelling against her parents, and against the stultifying non-expectations they have of her life beyond high school. And she is most importantly rebelling against the men in her life: against her grumpy, alcoholic dad (Yuri Nazarov), who flies into ugly, anti-Semitic rages when he has had a few, against her clingy, dull boyfriend Andrei (Andrei Fomin) about to do his military service and self-pityingly preoccupied with the fact that they haven’t had sex, and also against her pompous and self-satisfied brother Viktor (Alexander Alexeyev-Negreba), who left to be a doctor in Moscow and has now been summoned back to the family home to talk some sense into his little sister because her parents feel she has gone off the rails. She is even in a kind of rebellion against the man she falls in love with: Viktor’s friend, the swaggeringly handsome and sexy Sergei (Andrei Sokolov) who starts to take her for granted.

What sort of film is Little Vera? Thirty years on from its original release, it’s possible to see how it is not so much a harbinger of the future but a revival of a certain type of European film from 20 years in the past, perhaps the last great social realist movie of the classic kind, something to be compared with Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, or Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, or even Ingmar Bergman’s Summer With Monika. It’s a film in which the passion and vividness of the female lead is in contrast – and even at war – with the poverty and frustration that is all about.

We see Vera hanging out with her various dodgy friends at a kind of illegal open-air disco, which degenerates into violence. She has already become vaguely involved with a friend’s scheme for illegal currency conversion involving a stolen US $20 bill. It is here that she meets Sergei, feels the instant spark and has sex with him. This is happening in an era when Russia was as concerned with sexual health as the west, though with a more candidly homophobic attitude. Vera thoughtfully reads from a leaflet pinned up in Sergei’s tatty student room: “What you should know about Aids … Avoid casual sexual relations and contacts with homosexuals.”

In the pre-pill era, female sexual pleasure would be punished with the dreadful spectre of pregnancy. Pichul and Khmelik create a new twist on this classic social-realist disaster. Vera merely pretends that she is pregnant – to panic her parents into accepting her relationship with Sergei. That lie is a kind of aphrodisiac for them. They talk about it while they are having sex, and it is a kind of comforting risk-free illusion that cements their sensual intimacy.

But Sergei is far from happy and is catastrophically rude to her parents, which is an intimately painful insult to her dad, poor drunk Kolia. Vera was once the apple of his eye. Wheedlingly, pathetically, Kolia will ask bored Vera: “Remember how you used to put me to bed when you were little?” He means of course when he was too drunk to make it there on his own. It’s a sentimental, cloying memory that falls just short of abuse.

There are some extraordinary black-comic scenes in Little Vera. An extended sequence has Vera quarrelling with her friend Lenka (Alexandra Tabakova), who like Kolia is hurt that all Vera’s emotions are now engaged with Sergei. Finally, Christyakova gets up and demonstrates the “ha” posture that she has learned in yoga, stretching her arms in the air and throwing herself down to the ground. “Like this, we cleanse ourselves of psychic poison!”

Little Vera is a time capsule of the Soviet 80s and also of the European 60s, and, for all its bleakness and disillusion, there is a poignant innocence in it.

• Little Vera screens on 27 June at Regent Street Cinema, London.