Bookended by the post-industrial Midwestern hellscapes of Stranger Than Paradise and the twilight tourist Americana of Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law takes us to the bayous of New Orleans, where a pimp, a radio DJ, and an Italian traveler all wind up in jail.
The road movie genre is divisible into two general types: those that move, looking either forward to the promises of the horizon or away from the disappointments of the past—and those that don’t, the promises of the road making two halves of the parenthesis, charging the moment of stasis with meaning it might not otherwise have. Wendy and Lucy takes place in one of these pauses.
Whether lost in the pregnant pause of a phantom victory, swamped by the rush of bizarre sex appeal, or struggling with the desire to follow a new best friend but kept back by the ironclad claims of home, Pee-wee understands that dreams are the basis for strange journeys.