Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan comedy Down By Law,from 1986, is now on re-release. With its hypnotic score, stupendous performances and its superb monochrome cinematography by Robby Müller, it is something to set aside early work by David Lynch and Spike Lee. But it also gains from comparison with Jarmusch’s own later work, particularly his vampire fantasy Only Lovers Left Alive.

The eerie, ghost-town New Orleans that he conjured in Down By Law is like the post-economic-apocalypse of Detroit. Jarmusch has in each a miraculous gift for finding a dreamlike emptiness in cities, in which his characters and we, the audience, wander, as if in a lucid dream.

Down By Law is effortlessly laidback, superbly elegant. Jarmusch made it look easy. It stars Tom Waits as Zack, the unemployed DJ fitted up for a crime he didn’t commit and finding himself in a grim Louisiana prison with a sleazy pimp called Jack (excellently played by musician and actor John Lurie). They have to share their cell with an eccentric Italian, Roberto, and this was the film that launched Roberto Benigni on an unsuspecting world. It made a star of him – about which I still have mixed feelings. He is tremendous here; his simple presence lends surreality to the situation, but he is under close directorial control, which Benigni’s own later, sugary and over-indulged movies lacked.

Down By Law deserves its reputation for cinematic cool.