Given its inevitable mention in countless forthcoming reviews of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control – including mine, appearing here at The Screengrab later this morning – Dead Man is this week’s required viewing, not only as preparation for Jarmusch’s latest but also as a welcome antidote. Though the two share a formal exquisiteness, dissonant score, dreamlike atmosphere and stoic protagonist traversing a foreign locale, Dead Man exhibits little of the ponderous obliqueness and self-satisfied self-consciousness of Limits of Control, coasting on a mood of existentialist dread as it tracks Cleveland accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) to the town of Machine where he kills a man in self-defense and, after being hit by a bullet that can’t be extracted, is forced to flee west. His flight, aided by a Native American guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer) and set to the hauntingly dissonant sounds of Neil Young’s electric guitar, is one with obvious historical overtones. Yet although Jarmusch clearly intends his tale to resonate as a nightmarishly lyrical saga of American expansion and white male hegemony, he never unduly strains such concerns by resorting to dull exposition or indulgent allegorical gestures. Instead, Dead Man’s cultural-political concerns are left to naturally spring forth from Blake’s odyssey, which – thanks to Depp’s beautifully deadpan performance – also functions as an evocative portrait of an alienated man learning to understand himself and the world around him during the course of a journey into hell.