Paterson has been called Jim Jarmusch’s most personal work to date. The indie cinema stalwart denies that his love letter to poetry is a self-portrait, but it is the most literal manifestation of his decades-long obsession with finding great beauty in life’s smallest moments. “The New York School are my godfathers in a way, I studied with Kenneth Koch, and the great masterminds of the New York School,” Jarmusch recently told i-D of his longtime artistic inspirations. “I love these poets because they don’t take themselves too seriously, the poems can be funny and exuberant, and they don’t proclaim something to the world, they are just speaking to one other person.”
The new film stars Adam Driver as a bus driver with a secret gift for poetry. Yes, he writes it, but he also finds it everywhere — not just in notebooks but in the everyday interactions of those who inhabit the film’s titular New Jersey city. In one of Paterson‘s sweetest scenes, Driver’s unchanging routine is interrupted by a young girl (played by 12-year-old Sterling Jerins) who quite proudly proclaims that she’s a poet and proceeds to read to him from her own (padlocked, pink) notebook. “Water falls from the bright air / It falls like hair / Falling across a young girl’s shoulders,” she recites while Driver listens even more acutely than he does to the conversations of passengers along his daily bus route. Watch the exclusive clip below and catch Paterson in theaters from today.
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Image via YouTube