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From Stranger Than Paradise ('84) through Down by Law ('86) and Mystery Train ('89) to the more widely distributed Night on Earth ('91), Jim Jarmusch has marched, paraded, and taxied an unlikely assortment of characters both foreign and domestic through neighborhoods more shaky than chic from L.A. to Helsinki. Cinema's answer to Robert Rauschenberg, Jarmusch constructs his art from what he finds in the streets, exploiting the urban scene for its perverse beauty as well as its gritty toughness. What's less immediately apparent is that, beneath their cool, detached surfaces, all Jarmusch's films harbor a disarming optimism, a bemused conviction that the types we run into in some of the less fashionable quarters have pretty much the same ambitions and shortcomings--if not necessarily the same styles--as the rest of us.
Mystery Train. is a witty, engaging in which the director limits the action to a rundown neighborhood close by the Amtrak station in Memphis. No Chamber of Commerce showcase by day, this section of the city is, by night, a moody tableau in deep greens and blues. It's a setting to make Edward Hopper proud, and yet only occasionally does the film lapse into the noir mood these atmospherics might suggest. Subtly but insistently, Jarmusch invites us to regard this bluesy Southern river town, with its racially mixed population, as a microcosm of our national and even global struggle to accommodate differences. For all its camp and its cool, its dry humor and droll ironies, Mystery Train is, at bottom, a meditation on brotherhood.
Between cuts to titles, Jarmusch opens the film with a series of takes on an Amtrak train slicing through the kudzu-choked Southern countryside. Two passengers--young Japanese on a rock 'n' roll pilgrimage to America (Youki Kudoh, Masatoshi Nagase)--are playing a game of Rock Break Scissors for the right to select their next cassette tape. The tape that Mitzuko eventually pops into their dual-headphone Walkman becomes the title song of the film, Elvis Presley's last recording at Sun Studios. With its driving beat and plaintive wail, Elvis's rendition of "Mystery Train" infuses the film from the outset with the special spirit of Memphis and its music.
Jarmusch bolsters that spirit by perpetuating his habit of using singers and musicians as actors. Besides...