Each of Jarmusch’s characters, during the early portion of his career at least, were endless rovers. The characters may each have had their own home, or a place to lay down for the evening, but viewers aren’t really given an in-depth glimpse of what those domestic moments are like. But he director and writer isn’t interested in what makes a person normal. Jarmusch is concerned with those little quirks that make us each individuals. And part of the is try to explain why each of us is traveling from one place to another.

Working early on with longer narratives – each of his first few films is a concerted attempt to make it through an hour and change with a few characters pontificating on life and why they’re moving. Only with 1989’s Mystery Train did the writer begin to chop up his narratives and begin to interweave disparate stories into a seamless whole.

The feature following that and his first of the nineties’ finds the director working with some pretty well known talent as Jarmusch sets each of these players into a taxi cab. At the time Night on Earth was made, HBO was still hosting Taxi Cab Confessions and raking in ratings. That couldn’t have possibly impacted the director’s decisions as his distaste for anything passing for pop-culture is pretty well known. But mocking up five distinct stories only connected by virtue of being explained in a car seems close to the series.

Either way, each tale is set in a drastically different setting as Tom Waits works out a score that’s simultaneously haunting and jaunty – a difficult task to be sure. Regardless of the music, though, each scenario deals with a foreigner of some sort. Well, if you’re an American that works.

The first vignette details a newly minted cabby and an excursion to Brooklyn from Manhattan. His driving’s not too hot, but the driver, Helmut, makes a few friends. Moving to Los Angeles for the next story, Winona Rider isn’t a foreigner in a nationalist sort of way. But her character’s desire to be a mechanic in a town that prizes physicality over everything else sets her apart. Compounding that, Rider’s character turns down an opportunity that pretty much no one else would. She comes off as a naïve nymph, but that might not have been part of the character.

The final three sections of Night on Earth concern themselves with Europeans trucking around the continent for various reasons. After Down By Law, it’s refreshing to see and hear Roberto Benigni in his native country. He watches a church official die, but its still comedic. There’s a bit of racism that included in a different section as well as some down-on-his-luck story from a Nordic country. But the actual narrative in each of these sections isn’t even necessarily the point – even if each is pretty funny in its own manner.

Jarmusch again examines wanderlust, but makes it something of a unifying trait as opposed to sending some criminals off on the road. It’s a refinement to the director’s style, but he wouldn’t be content to revisit film constructed in the same manner for a while.