Tonight, as I ponder impending joblessness, I am watching Jim Jarmusch’s strange masterpiece, Dead Man.

Awkward, strange, unsettling, and (self-consciously) odd, Roger Ebert famously said “Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don’t have a clue what it is.” I found it fascinating, funny, and entrancing. It has a Neil Young, electric guitars soundtrack over dusty, black-and-white, cowboys-and-indians story with a roaming cast of famous faces and Scarlet Letter-esque foreshadowings of doom. It is a little bit ridiculous; Ebert had a point.

Which isn’t to dismiss this story of a man named William Blake, an Indian named Nobody, and big heapings of cinematic loneliness. The whole thing heads to an end that is defined early in the film when William Blake, an accountant from Cleveland, is shot. He will die and there is nothing to stop it. In that respect, the movie lets us worry over a fate that we should know that we share--we are all headed (slowly, we hope) toward our own death and it didn’t take a gun to set us on the course. Once that is established, we can settle in to see the story of a man with a poet’s name and precious little poetry in his life. The portrait of Blake is so bleak, in fact, that I found myself simply hoping that he would find some measure of grace before the end.

It’s not the easiest story, its pacing is uneven, and the script can be distracting, but that may be because the story seems to have an almost literary ambition behind its cinematic self-indulgence. Move past those rough bits and open yourself to the varied experiences of William Blake’s last days, and you might find a story worth loving, though. Or, at least, a story worth watching.