Its trio of characters - young Hungarian immigrant Eva (Eszter Balint), her deadbeat Americanised cousin Willie (John Lurie), and his dopey friend Eddie (Richard Edson) - have very little to say, and even less to do. We follow them from New York, where Eva has recently landed from Europe, to Cleveland, where the cousins have an aunt living, and eventually to the sandy beaches of Florida - and we wait around, them and us, for something to happen. And we wait. And wait.
Jarmusch has carved out a career from this kind of measured torpor, and it is handled as deftly here as in any of his later work. Eschewing traditions of narrative, yet adhering to some invisible sense of structure, Stranger Than Paradise trades in a solitary and soporific vision of American life, one seen through a glacially-paced swirl of TV dinners, ashtrays filled with smoking Chesterfields, cards played with creased old decks, and motel rooms bedecked with rickety cots and lonely lampshades hanging by curtained windows.
It looks gorgeous in black and white, filmed in long takes with a mostly static camera, and it is deadpan, melancholic, and at its very edges, always just out of direct sight, rich in emotion.
There is so little in the way of story events that to say anything more of the plot would spoil the film. What's important is that the three characters are never happy where they find themselves. They decide to go someplace new, and they discover it is much the same as where they just left. Restless, transient, yet filled with lethargy, they are, in the end, whatever their country of origin, utterly and irrevocably American.
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