Dead Man is my favorite work of auteur Jim Jarmusch – a “psychedelic western” (as Jarmusch termed it), it follows William Blake (no, not that William Blake – this one’s an accountant, played by Johnny Depp) who is duped into traveling to the rugged western frontier of the America 1800s, and who, for the sake of brevity, then suffers a series of increasingly horrible and bizarre calamities. Dead Man is beautifully shot in Jarmusch’s typically sumptuous black and white, boasts an all-star cast of eccentrics (Depp! Billy Bob Thornton! Crispin Glover! John Hurt! Robert Mitchum! Iggy Pop! Lance Henriksen! Gabriel Byrne! Alfred Molina!), and features an unsettling improvised (!!) score from Neil Young. Poetic and lyrical, yet crudely funny, it’s a series of spectacular contradictions.Dead Man is the kind of movie that you can’t help but suspect contains more within it than you’ll ever manage to uncover.
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