Quirky doesn’t even begin to describe Jim Jarmusch’s cinematic style. Once again, he looks at immigration in a gritty city as he did in his early film, “Stranger Than Paradise,” where Cleveland rocks. Once again a unique, sometimes gentle and playful sense of humor suffuses his vision of life in America. In “Paterson,” he follows municipal bus-driver and poet, Paterson (Adam Driver), through a week of his life in Paterson, NJ. Paterson. awakens before his wife every workday, eats his Cheerios, drives his bus, writes his poems, and eats dinners his incredibly ‘creative’ and ever optimistic Iranian immigrant wife Laura, she of the black and white world, crafts with, purportedly, him in mind. We meet their bulldog Marvin, Paterson’s ‘friends’ at the bar, and the people he overhears or encounters. We hear male braggadocio, lovesick desperation, female aspiration, youthful radicalism, and the anger of partners pushed too far. The dispatcher who truly lets Paterson hear his endless tale of woe hit a little too close to home for me. In Paterson we see a man of the written and parsed word in a city where powerful waterfalls create powerful poetry. He’s a very quiet, almost dreamy person for whom each word has its special place in the poem, although his wife is really the dreamer. Wonderful work from all the characters, each sculpted as flawed and deeply human. This includes Misotoshe Nagase (who was also in Jarmusch’s “Mystery Train,”) as a Japanese poetry lover who comes to Paterson to see the city that birthed the persons and poetry of William Carlos Williams and Alan Ginsburg. This film brings us into life’s small yet momentous arc. No huge explosions or vehicles bursting into flames which so many of our imaginations have been trained to expect. Danger seems to lurk around the corner but the reality that flows from it is suggests how very much we’ve had our vision of film – and life – constructed by media. As usual, there are plenty of sly jokes, but here the city itself is part of both the economic problems of our time and beauty. Visually there are shots that feel like Edward Hopper paintings from the 1930s and the film progresses with the poetic tempo of its protagonists, the poet and the city.