Paterson review: Jim Jarmusch takes poetic licence to the end of the line

Every day Paterson (Adam Driver) awakens at 6am, eats a bowl of Cheerios and heads out to work. Every day, he composes some poetry on the steering wheel of the bus he drives, exchanges pleasantries with a stressed colleague, then pulls out of the depot.

Every day, he listens to fragments of conversation among his passengers before returning home to his artistic wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). Every day, he takes their English bulldog Marvin out for a walk via a local dive bar where Paterson drinks one beer and exchanges pleasantries with the bartender (Barry Shabaka Henley) and various regulars.

If you thought Jim Jarmusch's milieu was Zen before, just wait until you see Paterson, a film that adheres rigidly to the structural sparsity of a William Carlos Williams poem, a writer who is referenced several times, not least by the film's title, which is also the protagonist's name and the New Jersey town where the film is set. In keeping with this poetic scheme, Jarmusch litters Paterson with doubles and duplicates, rhyme and repetition.

The film, in this spirit, for all its apparent tranquillity, is not without incident and oppositions. Laura, a loving, creative dilettante who is as bustling as her partner is still, paints monochrome curtains, bakes monochrome cupcakes and orders a monochrome guitar.

Military photographs by the bedside and a brief barroom altercation hint at a dark, undisclosed past. A bad day brings on sullen reflection which is punctured, delightfully, by the appearance of Mystery Train's Masatoshi Nagase.

Jarmusch, too, is in reflective mood: Paterson quietly contemplates the creative process and the beauty of everyday things through the unlikely personage of a Star Wars villain. Who knew Driver could be so mesmerisingly motionless?  This is just to say, we have watched a perfect plum of a movie.