The Indianapolis Museum of Art provided an elegant setting for Sunday’s screening of “The BQE,” but the film offered few images of style and grace.

Musician Sufjan Stevens made the 37-minute tribute to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway — an “ugly object of urban architecture,” he admitted during an audience Q&A session at the Tobias Theater.

Decrepit skyscrapers line the BQE, while passengers in cars often see nothing more than noise-barrier walls. Gridlock is a certainty rivaling death and taxes. You may glimpse the glamorous skyline of Manhattan, but you’re not there.

Even if the film is a long shot to be adopted by the New York City Visitors and Convention Bureau, Sunday’s multi-media event was one to applaud. The Osso string quartet and singer-songwriter DM Stith performed for a crowd of 600, and credit the star power of Stevens — known for his critically acclaimed 2005 album “Illinois” — for the sellout.

Michigan native and current Brooklyn resident Stevens musters Big Apple swagger on “The BQE’s” soundtrack, especially when a Sinatra-esque swing arrangement celebrates traffic’s chaotic flow. On a more intimate scale, brass instruments introduce big rigs as the road’s champions with close-up images of grilles, headlights and company logos.

The film loses its way when Stevens pairs a techno composition to sped-up footage showing a driver’s perspective. It’s a simple, predictable choice. Then there are the puzzling “Hooper Heroes,” three women who execute hula-hoop routines to break up the dreary vistas of “The BQE.”

Osso proved Stevens is a master at detailing flesh-and-blood behavior by covering six of his songs to open the show. The group’s “Run Rabbit Run” project is a string-quartet interpretation of his all-electronic “Enjoy Your Rabbit” album released in 2001.

“Year of the Monkey” featured two violins, a viola and a cello grating against one another in futility, finally getting together for one triumphant chord at the song’s conclusion. “Year of the Boar” was aggressive, repetitive and dissonant in the tradition of iconic movie composer Bernard Herrmann. Solo passages by violin player Jannina Barefield were as abrasive and unhinged as a listener might expect from Sonic Youth guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo.

Before singer-songwriter Stith lost momentum during the second half of his performance, the design student at Indiana University shared several lyrical gems: “Slick licorice road,” “A misty light, imprecise and still” and “I’m leaving out the parts I don’t like.”