It’s hard to know how to go about using words to do justice to Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, a film seemingly designed to reveal the folly of associating language with meaning, so concerned it is with the rhythm and atmosphere of code over courting traditional satisfaction by suggesting conceivable systems for breaking it. In talking about a picture in which everything is surface (or else nothing is), and the relationship between all signs and their meanings are scrambled (or none are), is everything a spoiler? (Or, perhaps nothing is?)

It’s possible that you’re frustrated already, and you wouldn’t be the only one; Jarmusch’s film is the first to be released this calendar year to truly polarize critics to the point where some of my colleagues have suggested that it’s one of the filmmaker’s worst efforts, while others champion it as one of his best. As such, it seems necessary to be more transparently subjective than usual: I like it. The Limits of Control seems to work best for those who can roll with the fact that Jarmusch is trafficking in vague genre promises that he only barely cashes in on, and that the story’s perceived mystery is a MacGuffin to pave the way for a rumination on creative idealism as a code that crosses transnational lines, bridging gaps of language and ethnic difference to unite dreamers/travelers (signified here as one and the same) in a common fight against those who seek to destroy their philosophy in the name of global capitalist homogeneity.

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