"In many ways, Only Lovers Left Alive is the film to which Jim Jarmusch has been building for his entire career. Since he broke through with Stranger Than Paradise three decades ago, Jarmusch has trained his camera time and again on society's outsiders- inept pimps, down-and-out deejays, cab drivers of all stripes, accountants in the Old West, and self-styled samurai assassins. Here, he focuses on a pair of centuries-old vampires, social rejects out of necessity. Eve (the otherworldly Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) still drink blood- albeit largely obtained through medical sources, an unethical but decidedly less murderous and certainly cleaner alternative to traditional means.
"But what to do in between meals? Like many Jarmusch heroes, they immerse themselves in culture, primarily the culture of the past- though to be fair, they're old enough that it still counts as their past. Eve partakes from a seemingly endless supply of books written in countless languages, caressing the pages softly as she reads each one in the flick of an eye, when she's not paying visits to her old-in-multiple-senses friend, Christopher "Kit" Marlowe (a memorably cadaverous John Hurt). Adam, by contrast, devotes most of his time to his career as a reclusive recording artist, laying down one fashionably funereal track after another in his makeshift studio. When he's not creating, he's amassing an enviable collection of vintage guitars or grooving on his collection of classic vinyl, or just driving around post-industrial Detroit.
"If nothing else, the way Jarmusch depicts Adam's adopted hometown makes it easily the best Motor City movie since RoboCop. The city Adam surveys on his nightly drives is little more than a hollowed-out husk of its former glory, but it has lost none of the shoot-from-the-hip industrial sensibility of the town that gave the world Motown and MC5, Eminem and Jack White (it's the Rust Belt-dwelling spiritual cousin to Jarmusch's Memphis-set Mystery Train). It's a nighttime city that belongs to the outcasts- in addition to Adam, we mostly see young rocker dudes who are seemingly unaware that the heyday of rock is behind them, along with a hepcat doctor played by Jeffrey Wright who gets the film's best line when he looks at Adam and mutters, "that cat's gotta be from Cleveland."
"Only Lovers Left Alive is full of pleasures both large and small, but those pleasures rarely dove with the traditional vampire-film formula. Adam and Eve aren't the suave throwbacks of the classic Dracula stories, nor the desperate characters of the vampire-junkie indie films of the mid-1990s, and they certainly wouldn't be caught dead at a Cullen family get-together. Jarmusch is less concerned with paying tribute to vampire legends of yore than he is in forging his own path with his material, and indeed, just when the film is about to provide the expected vampire-movie payoff, he rolls credits.
"While both the storytelling and the filmmaking on display in Only Lovers Left Alive are first-rate in a no-sweat sort of way, its true greatness lies in the way that, more than any film I've seen in years, it feels like a great hangout movie, creating a world and filling it with people I'd like to revisit again and again. To put it another way - I'd love to live in Only Lovers Left Alive, but for the sad fact that I'd eventually wind up on the menu." ~ Paul Clark
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