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Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles is both a real street and a myth.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

Like Broadway in New York and Ocean Drive in Miami, Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles is both a real street and a myth. It’s where you go to gas up at the Arco station (5007 Sunset Boulevard) or grab a meal at In-N-Out Burger (7009 Sunset), and also to chase the dream of fame and eternal sunshine. Remarkably, Sunset lives up to the postcard.

Drive east to west, from where the street begins downtown to where it ends 22 twisting miles later at the Pacific Ocean, and at any point along the route, you will see the images that movies, TV shows and magazines have implanted in your brain.

A flower vendor crossing Sunset and Harper Avenue.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

In hip and historically Mexican Echo Park and Silver Lake, you’ll find trendy boutiques beside a 99 Cents Only store (3612 Sunset), and cool kids scarfing down tacos at Guisados (1261 Sunset).

In Hollywood, there are always weird Hollywood people, and tourists hoping to see weird Hollywood people, walking around near where Sunset meets Vine.

The Sunset Strip does in fact have giant billboards in the sky advertising the latest blockbuster movie and all the famous nightclubs whose names (The Roxy, 9009 Sunset; the Viper Room, 8852 Sunset) you may know from watching “E! True Hollywood Story.”

On the corner of Sunset and Ivar Avenue.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

“The Palladium in the background, the motorcycle, the palm trees, the blue sky — it’s almost like the establishing shot in a movie,” the photographer Jake Michaels said.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

On Sunset and Cahuenga Boulevard.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

Moving west into Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, the street becomes wide and lush and curving. The sidewalks and pedestrians disappear, and the wealthy residents in their mansions hide from the celebrity-home bus tours behind walls of hedgerow — the Sunset of “Sunset Boulevard” and “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.”

When you see the line of tall palm trees arcing over the pink facade of the Beverly Hills Hotel (9641 Sunset), the whole thing becomes undeniable: Sunset Boulevard is a visual cliché of itself.

Is that so bad? Not at all. It can even be strange and wonderful and moving, as shown through these photographs by Jake Michaels, who drove the length of Sunset with his camera. He wanted to capture the “microcultures” the boulevard passes through on its journey to the beach. But in documenting daily life there, Mr. Michaels inevitably captured the myth, too.

The Body Shop, a strip club on Sunset.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

Shooting from inside his car, on a bright day, he found a guy in black leather astride a motorcycle, waiting for a light to change near the Hollywood Palladium (6215 Sunset). “The Palladium in the background, the motorcycle, the palm trees, the blue sky — it’s almost like the establishing shot in a movie,” Mr. Michaels said.

Deeper into West Hollywood, he encountered two rocker guys in a black Corvette Stingray, looking like they’d just left band rehearsal for Faster Pussycat. For some, it will forever be 1986 on the Sunset Strip. There’s an odd timelessness to the image — an evocation of the real-life present and an eternal music video of the mind.

Soaking up the sun on Sunset and Coronado Street.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

Jasmine Churchwell and Keir Reid celebrated their anniversary with a trip to Amoeba Music, a record store on Sunset.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

In the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

Farther east, in Echo Park, another sneakily haunting image surfaced: a man and woman cruising in an old burgundy Ford Galaxie 500, California car culture personified. He looks laid-back cool behind the wheel in sunglasses and a Curtis Mayfield leather cap. But with its sun streaks, soft focus and off-kilter framing, the photo has a fleeting, ethereal quality. Like a ghost image of the east side 30 years earlier, before the waves of gentrification, or the present moment glimpsed in its impermanence.

Outside the Palladium Theater on Sunset and El Centro.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

There is expressive fashion in these images, as you’d expect to find on a street that beckons people to express themselves. A bald slim man with head tattoos poses in vibrantly distressed flare-leg jeans; a man and woman talk on the sidewalk, the woman dressed in a cherry red suit; a white-haired old hippie named Chuck shows off his sleeveless denim jacket, with its decades of sewn-on rock ’n’ roll patches.

Mr. Michaels met Chuck in a parking lot at the end of Sunset, down by the beach. He told the photographer he’d just come from the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine (17190 Sunset), the curious, white-domed, temple-like building in Pacific Palisades, itself an icon and visual stereotype for West Coast spiritual seeking.

On Sunset and Orange Drive.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

Chuck Berez at the coastal end of Sunset, where the boulevard meets the beach.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

Outside the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine Temple.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times

Mr. Michaels’s most self-reflective image in his estimation was one he took outside Amoeba Music (6400 Sunset), back in Hollywood. He spotted a teenage couple there one night and began talking to them. It was the couple’s anniversary, they told him. They’d come to buy records, and couldn’t wait to go home and listen to music together.

Photographed walking and holding hands, the boy wears a kind of military jacket and a wisp of mustache, the girl a vintage fur coat and waves of long brown curls. Like the rockers, they are present-day figures from another decade. It could be 1974, or 2018. As Mr. Michaels put it: “The future goes on, but the past stays present.”

It brought him back to his own teenage years hanging out on the Sunset Strip in the early 2000s, and confirmed how some places enliven and elevate otherwise typical moments.

A couple of regular teenagers out together becomes an iconic portrait of young love. Why? Because it’s on Sunset Boulevard.

A stretch limousine drives down Sunset toward the strip.CreditJake Michaels for The New York Times