Along with my reviews of new releases, I’ll be going back and watching the entire canon of directors whose work I want to explore. First up is Jim Jarmusch. Having seen and loved Dead Man, Coffee and Cigarettes, and Only Lovers Left Alive, I’m excited to dive into his earlier work, so I’ll be starting at the beginning with Jarmusch’s debut feature from 1980: Permanent Vacation.

The best way I can describe Permanent Vacation is as Eraserhead meets Rebel Without a Cause. Although Jarmusch’s first film lacks the overt surrealism of Lynch’s, Jarmusch places his angry young man in a desolate urban environment reminiscent of Henry Spencer’s to similarly unsettling effect. And while Permanent Vacation is nowhere near as disturbing or entertaining as Eraserhead, and its main character is nowhere near as cool as James Dean, the movie is effective in spatially, temporally, and emotionally isolating its beatnik protagonist in a nearly unrecognizable version of Manhattan.

It took me some time to realize that Aloysius Christopher Parker (Chris Parker)—who greases his hair, dances to jazz records for his Suzanne Pleshette-lookalike girlfriend Leila (Leila Gastil), and wanders through a bombed-out and empty cityscape—is in fact a resident of New York circa 1980. An encounter with a shell-shocked Vietnam vet and a few brief forays into the “normal” world eventually let us know that we’re well past the 1950s, but Aloysius’s reference to a war that seems to be on American soil complicates things. At one point, Aloysius tells Leila that he’s going to visit the building where he was born and which was blown up during the war. “What are you talking about? What war? Blown up by who?” asks Leila, to which he replies “The Chinese.” Leila seems unaware of this war, but the people and places which Aloysius encounters on his wanderings certainly look war-torn, and his mother corroborates his story (although, granted, she is in a mental institution).

These discrepancies illustrate how detached from the outside world Aloysius chooses to be. We see it in his preference for wandering the city and sleeping on rooftops when he has an apartment and a bed (or at least a mattress) and in the way he responds to Leila’s comment “I’m tired of being alone” with a monologue about his own deliberate isolation. Rather than roaming the busy streets we see in the film’s opening shots, he chooses to visit back alleys, crumbling buildings, and his mother’s mental institution. He even seems determined to deprive himself of any pleasure, abandoning his reading of Les Chants de Maldoror and walking away from John Lurie’s saxophone performance although he clearly relishes both. This kind of stoic devotion to remaining on the fringes places Aloysius outside of any living culture or counterculture. He isn’t a punk. He’s a romantic determined to play the role of an outcast living in the wrong time.

The template for the movie’s structure, and its most enjoyable moment, occurs about halfway through the film when Aloysius meets a man (played by Frankie Faison) in the lobby of a nearly empty movie theater. He begins telling Aloysius a joke by giving him the punchline first, saying, “The Doppler Effect, that’s the name of my joke”—the result being that throughout his lengthy story we keep wondering how the Doppler Effect is going to come into play. And when it does, it is both devastating and hilarious. The fate of the sax player in the joke points out the fact that the world is full of coincidence, but that these coincidences have no meaning.

Like the joke at its center, Permanent Vacation begins by telling us the end. Aloysius’s voice-over informs us that he is now in a place where he doesn’t understand the language, foretelling his journey to France, but he also lays out the theme of the film when he says “what’s a story anyway, except one of those connect the dots drawings that in the end forms a picture of something.” By piecing together Aloysius’s random encounters and aimless wanderings, we begin to see patterns. But in the end, these patterns and coincidences add up to nothing at all. For all his posturing as some sort of philosopher, Aloysius, like the sax player from the joke, seems destined to repeat the same pattern abroad as he did at home, making no impact on the world whatsoever.

The nihilism, ambling pace, and frustrating main character of Permanent Vacation make it a less enjoyable watch than Jarmusch’s later films, but it is worth watching for moments of humor such as the Doppler Effect joke and Aloysius’s extended dance sequence; moments of beauty like the shot of Leila framed in the mirror like a painting in their rundown apartment; and moments of downright creepiness in the asylum and back alleys of Aloysius’s wanderings. French New Wave films are a clear influence on the plot (or lack thereof) and characterization, but Jarmusch’s distinct humor makes it a unique first feature.

If nothing else, check out these clips of a great dance scene and my new favorite joke from Permanent Vacation.