Café au lait: Iggy and Waits photo: Jim Jarmusch Coffee and Cigarettes Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch United Artists, opens May 14 more film most popular most commented Short Order, a Movie about Munching and Mating, Tracking Shots by ABIGAIL DEUTSCH Prince Caspian by Ella Taylor Paraguayan Hammock by J. Hoberman James Nares's Downtown Empire Strikes Back by Ed Halter Reprise Tracking Shots by Ella Taylor Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Perhaps a trifling gag gift like Coffee and Cigarettes is the price we pay for Jarmusch's redoubtable presence; think of your 10-spot, if you're so inclined, as a tithe to his next real film. C&C began inauspiciously enough: as a six-minute, 1986 SNL short in which Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright meet at a café table, smoke and drink coffee, and babble uncommunicatively to each other. Running with this wafer-thin idea—and two additional and similar shorts shot since, one starring Cinqué Lee, Joie Lee, and Steve Buscemi, the other Tom Waits and Iggy Pop—Jarmusch conceived eight more vignettes, all centered around cups o' joe and some smokes, all shot in high-contrast black-and-white.

C&C hardly coalesces, but then again, it doesn't try to—never more or less than what it appears to be, the film is a slow honky-tonk thud-beat, only intermittently punctuated by a joke or idea. Crispy conversational tidbits reoccur; silences are long and awkward. Essentially playing themselves, the various co-conspirators (who include Bill Murray and the White Stripes) occasionally break out of the caffeinated trance: Cate Blanchett, playing both herself and her jealous white-trash cousin, whips up enough bemused psychodrama for an hour's worth of soap opera, while Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, in a deft teatime contest between Hollywood careering and normalized social intercourse, expertly flesh out the best-written episode. But if there's a moving moment among the stubbed butts, it's the wounded look on Iggy's face when Waits lackadaisically insults him during a friendly roadhouse rendezvous—somehow this ragged visage of age-old American pop-ness still exudes a boyhood's tender innocence.