You can read it in William Blake’s living dead eyes that shine like black pools, that death lies within him. A series of events leads an accountant to become caught up in a fateful lovers’ quarrel. After taking a bullet right through the heart, the tobacco-seeking indigenous Nobody offers to help the accountant be reborn as the poet William Blake. In the words of the aphorism-slinging Nobody, this stupid, white-skinned man is led through the endless cycle of life and death: deer and birds, American marshals and industrialist patriarchs, cannibalistic bounty hunters, missionaries, and fur traders. Is he the kind of poet who writes his poetry in blood?

Neil Young’s lush strumming on the electric guitar, the baroque compositions of Jarmusch’s long-time cinematographer Robby Müller, the confusion of Johnny Depp’s lovable outsider when faced with the unknown, and the lumbering pace make this neo-western a hypnotic odyssey. Expressing his distaste for John Ford’s white-centric westerns and their ideology based on the subjugation of nature and Indigenous Peoples, Jarmusch revises the iconography of the Wild West in a revisionist way, making Depp’s protagonist the perfect anti-hero and playing with the poetry and life story of the poet Blake (1757–1827). Originally known as a film maudit, or a “cursed film”, because of its meagre box office success and lacklustre reviews, over time this visual ballad has acquired the status of transcendental cinema and is arguably Jarmusch’s best film.