The films of Jim Jarmusch, the performances of Adam Driver, and the great state of New Jersey have a number of things in common. The most glaring of which is that they all inspire complicated feelings and make you a little bit sad. So, it’s a bit surprising that those three primal forces of existential confusion are only joining forces for the first time now. In Paterson, written and directed by Jarmusch, Driver plays a man named Paterson who drives a bus in Paterson, New Jersey. You can just tell that the movie is going for something there. It follows the eponymous protagonist over the course of a week in his normal, boring, no-car-chase-having life as he hangs out with his girlfriend (Rosewater’s Golshifteh Farahani), walks her dog, drives his bus, and scribbles contemplative prose poetry into his journal.
After seeing its premiere at Cannes in May, The A.V. Club gave it an A- and said it “may be the most existential movie Jim Jarmusch has ever made—and that’s saying a lot.” And while you might be getting an off-putting pretentious vibe from this description, rest assured that Driver’s character “is deathly allergic to pretension, and the film inhabits his sensibility.”
The trillions of subatomic particles that make up Paterson will be released into theaters in France on December 21 and in the U.S. on December 28.