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The vampires that walk among us — and they do — are not the Twilight kind, or the True Blood kind, or even the Buffy kind. In the world of Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, the director's most emotionally direct film since Dead Man, and maybe his finest, period, vampires are people who prefer to own their music in some tangible form rather than entrust it to some unseen librarian in the Cloud. They care about the exact age of beautiful things — silk dressing gowns, string quartets — and about how they were made. They surround themselves with stacks of books. They like to know the Latin names of flora and fauna. They stay in love for a very long time, even through periods of long separation. And though they may be youngsters of 20, or 40, or 80 on the outside, inside they feel 300 or more, witnesses to an ever-marching parade of culture that sometimes seems to have left them behind.
This is Jarmusch's most emotionally direct film since Dead Man, and maybe his finest.
If any of that sounds self-pitying, that's part of the point: The old ways have to scooch over for the new, and Jarmusch, who was making eccentric little indies before "indies" were even a thing, has enough of a sense of humor to admit that isn't always bad. When Tom Hiddleston, as an ancient vampire musician living amid piles of 45s in a decrepit Detroit Victorian, fondles an early '60s Hagstrom guitar, he flips it over to examine its pearly back: "Mother of toilet seat!" he says with nerdy admiration. It's a joke that wouldn't have gone over in the days of Vlad the Impaler.
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