With DEAD MAN, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death. Accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in the middle of a fatal lovers’ quarrel.
Abandoned by her family as an unwed mother and sold as a prostitute to soldiers by a traveling salesman, Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis) decides to live as a man. As ‘Jo,’ she settles in the shabby mining town of Ruby City and becomes a frontiersman.