Lust for life

The cliffhanger in Paterson is a gift of Japanese stationery; in the last moments of screen time we are truly rooting for Adam Driver to begin writing in it. Woe betide the artist on whom Hollywood fixes, I think Robert Hughes once said; movies about authors more so, their plots confined to writer's block and the anti-car-chase narrative of getting published. High and low – Sunset Boulevard, Betty Blue, Henry and June, The Shining, The Ghost Writer, Barton Fink – the big papery thing tied up with string is rarely more than a MacGuffin. (Special mention: the scene in Wonder Boys in which Grady Tripp rolls a new page into the typewriter, types a three-digit page number, checks the work in progress, sighs, types a fourth.)

In Paterson the story is the actual making of the work, how this image gives rise to that word and so on. The sensitive blend of poems by William Carlos Williams, Ron Padgett and director Jim Jarmusch avoids biopic artifice – no Fred Ward bashing out what you know isn't Tropic of Cancer.

Paterson is born and raised in Paterson, a rhyming origin which has destined him to become a poet. The ongoing appearance of different sets of twins in the movie signals his perception of patterns and his inspiration. The director, like Paterson's girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), paints with a trowel: the actors deliver every line like it's a eulogy. But in our age of over-decorated epics and sentimental Uber-dramas the brusqueness is refreshing. Frederick Elmes' camera finds richness and colour. Barry Shabaka Henley reminds us he can play anything. Masatoshi Nagase who brings said notebook starred in Jarmusch's Mystery Train. He is a visitor from a larger world. The director remains happily at home.