Dead Man

1995 • 121 minutes

About this movie

With Dead Man, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death. Accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in the middle of a fatal lovers’ quarrel. Wounded and on the lam, Blake falls under the watch of the outcast Nobody (Gary Farmer), who guides his companion on a spiritual journey, teaching him to dispense poetic justice along the way. Featuring austerely beautiful black-and-white photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.

Ratings and reviews

Loved it! Very strange plot ,I dont believe anyone else could have brought the character to lie without the likings of JOHNNY DEPP himself......

I've watched this move half a dozen times at least. Cinema at its finest. To paraphrase Archibald Macleish, "A movie should not mean, but be."

How can this film have only three ratings?! This is the third time that I've watched it and finally decided to put down the money to buy it (I think that this is the first movie I've ever purchased.) It's certainly in my top 10 all time movies.