Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law

* * * (out of 4)

Three guys in a jail cell - American drunken balladeer with a heart of gold Tom Waits, laconic lounge lizard John Lurie and that lovably affable, annoyingly eccentric Italian portrait of good cheer in the face of impossible odds, Roberto Begnini.

They're stuck and steamin'. They're low on cigarettes, and Begnini keeps telling stupid jokes in his thick accent. They're in the pen for crimes they didn't commit. Hours and hours go by with nothing to do but engage in idle chit chat and maintain their cool disposition.

One day, they're playing some poker. Begnini claimed to be a hardcore card shark, but he stinks and he's losing big to Lurie. Lurie "screams" a cheer to himself. You know - a little, half whispered roar of the crowd. Begnini asks him what he's doing. "Screaming," Lurie deadpans, then Begnini recounts a funny little saying he picked up on. It goes, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream."

Begnini keeps repeating the slogan again and again, thinking his cellmates don't understand. At first, it's cute, then it's annoying, and then he repeats it so many times that Lurie shrugs his shoulders, grins, and starts repeating it with him, copying his Eye-talian accent. "I-ya scream, a-You-a scream-a, we all-a scream-a for ice-a cream-a!" It's infectious.

Waits can't help himself, and pretty soon all three of them are on their feet in a little impromptu dance, moving in a circle saying it over and over again, to the point where it's long past annoying, into the realm of the comically brilliant, or the absurd. I was on the floor as these three musical personalities busted out into a riff, and before long the entire cell block is chanting along with them.

That's the spirit of Jim Jarmusch's essentially plotless, laid back and stidently hip slacker movie, Down By Law. You drift along with these three amiable deadbeats as we observe their lives of cheap coffee and cigarettes, pimps and hookers, broken down cars and lousy roach mill hotel rooms. Personally, I was enjoying the observational humor of watching the dead end lives of Waits and Lurie, who make for likable and charismatic screen presences, before they got tossed in the clink.

Once they're in prison, the movie slides into two long and drawn out setpieces, featuring the three guys passing the time in prison, Sam Beckett style, and their subsequent escape and adventures wandering through the bijou trying to find the main highway, and crafting half baked schemes to either ride out west or travel east, though, ultimately, it doesn't matter what road these lovable losers take - it'll still be the hotel rooms, cigarettes and deadbeats they've always been around.

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