Yeah, so I “liked” Broken Flowers. And given the enduring popularity of its creator and star, it seems plenty likely that lots of other people will too. But is that enough? Jim Jarmusch, who helped launch the New American Independent cinema of the Eighties and back in 1995 took the legacy of American manifest destiny and bent it to his will in Dead Man, proving irrefutably that a downtown hipster filmmaker need not wear that mantle forever, shouldn’t be merely coasting on goodwill a mere decade after his greatest triumph. Barely over 50, with prodigious connections and unimpeachable credibility that forces the rooms where his films screen to take on the haughty pretentiousness and knowing acquiescence of an art gallery, Jarmusch somehow has the independent film world wrapped around his fingers (witness the series of solidly overbooked press screenings that this writer barely squeezed into), even though if you take Dead Man out of the equation (a movie which was little cared for on release and still perplexes), his filmography compresses to near paper-thin. But then, most filmmakers don’t have one Dead Man in them, or even a Stranger than Paradise, much less both or multiples of either. Is it really worth complaining if Broken Flowers slightly underwhelms?

Regardless, the first 20 minutes of Jarmusch’s latest pass by in stunningly awkward fashion, so much so that it’s hard to shake the impression that both creator and subject, inhabiting respectively familiar territories, decided on the occasion of their inaugural full-length collaboration to just…coast. How often in the course of Bill Murray’s recent career recuperation has he been required only to sit motionless, upper and lower jaws just missing each other, puckering his cheeks slightly and creating the by-now trademark sense of wan apathy? (That’s subtle acting, folks!) And how often in Jarmusch’s films has a similar wry stillness taken over, to very similar ends? (Sardonic minimalism totally rules!) Until Murray’s Don J(ua/oh)nston, has his quest laid out for him by spirit guide/neighbor/amateur sleuth Winston (Jeffrey Wright) Broken Flowers feels tremendously familiar, but not in comforting way—more like onset of constipation than inspiration. Where an abrupt cut to a striped gym-suited Murray lying face down and awkward on his couch elicited laughter from the rest of the audience, I was the odd man out, worried about the prospects of a screening full of forced amusement at non-jokes and nodding approval of utter nothingness.

It gets better. Though Broken Flowers represents Jarmusch’s return to feature-length narrative—his first since 2000’s Ghost Dog—it’s still somewhat maddeningly structured around circumscribed repetitive interactions in the fashion of Night on Earth, Mystery Train, and Coffee and Cigarettes. Don travels to an anonymous location (all of them in actuality within a few hundred miles from Murray’s New Jersey domicile), acquires pink flowers, arrives unexpectedly at the home of a former lover, and casually tries to divine information about the writer of a letter alleging a son he’s never known. His visits meet with wildly differing reactions and a general sense of diminishing returns: He winds up in bed with Sharon Stone’s widower Laura, gets a free dinner and tacit acknowledgement of happier times spent together from Frances Conroy’s married, childless real-estate agent Dora, bitterness from Jessica Lange’s homeopath Carmen, and ends with a busted face at the hands of Penny, played by a nearly unrecognizable Tilda Swinton, and her white-trash husband Will (Larry Fessenden, director of Wendigo). Clues abound (pink home decorations and clothing, typewriters, or lack thereof being the most common), but an answer to the pivotal question—just who gave birth to this son—isn’t forthcoming. Credit to the ladies for finely drawn characterizations (though this might be Jarmusch’s best ladies picture, his adventurer is stubbornly, resolutely a dude) that keep these encounters from blending together, but I still wonder at Jarmusch’s fascination with repeated circumstances—pushing his narrative resolutely, grimly forward in Dead Man didn’t hurt his filmmaking at all. Maybe he prefers this role of rhythm guitarist banging out a 12-bar for his performers to improvise over, but the kinds of facile “the quest IS the answer” business that Jarmusch uses to attach import to wheel spinning is growing somewhat tiresome.

For those who buy the shtick, Jarmusch’s longevity and interest in repeated-ness might warrant a comparison to The Fall (though his output is nowhere near as prolific), but for me, at this stage in his career, he feels more like R.E.M. I don’t want to draw too direct a line of parallel (even if Dead Man would make a nice counterpoint to Autotmatic for the People’s morbid grandeur), but there’s something in appreciation of both of their recent work that creates a response that’s always necessarily tempered by past regard. I walked out of the theatre verging on ranking Broken Flowers amongst the best of Jarmusch’s cinema. But after reflection, my enthusiasm seemed more the result of winning the last seat in the house coupled with the impact of a terrific ending to a benign, well-performed road movie. Honestly compare Broken Flowers’ interest in probing past regrets to something literally staggering like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, and you’re bound to come up short. But when the last bone Jim tossed us was Coffee and Cigarettes, I suppose it’s easy to see why everyone’s drinking so thirstily from such a shallow well.