Stranger Than Paradise is a 1984 American black-and-white absurdist deadpan comedy film directed, co-written and co-edited by Jim Jarmusch, and starring jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson, and Hungarian-born actress and violinist Eszter Balint.

[1] The film is a three-act story about Willie, who lives in Brooklyn, and his interactions with the two other main characters, his cousin Eva and friend Eddie.

Despite his growing fondness for Eva, Willie refuses to take her on his trips to the racetrack with Eddie, his good-natured friend and hustling accomplice.

His esteem for her increases when she returns from an excursion with a few canned food items, a TV dinner "especially" for him, and, to his astonishment, a carton of cigarettes, all obtained without money.

Eva, smart, pretty, and low-key, likes to play her favorite song, Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You", which Willie dislikes.

The second act starts a year later and opens with Willie and Eddie winning a large amount of money by cheating at poker.

Willie asks Eddie about borrowing his brother-in-law's car, telling him "I just wanna get out'a here, see sump'in different, ya know?".

When they arrive in Cleveland, they stop at Lotte's house, then go to surprise Eva at her job at a local fast-food restaurant, where she is excited and pleased to see them.

When Willie and Eddie return, Eva's annoyance turns to dismay when the distraught pair reveal they have lost most of their money on dog races.

Willie still refuses to let Eva come along, so she goes out on the beach for a walk, wearing a flamboyant wide-brimmed straw hat she has just gotten from a gift shop.

A drug dealer mistakes her for a courier he has been waiting for and gives her an envelope with a large sum of money, while berating her and her presumed boss.

Willie and Eddie, having won big at the horse races and gone through the better part of a bottle of whisky, return to the motel to find Eva gone.

In the final shot, we see Eva returning to the empty motel room, looking tired and perplexed, toying with the straw hat.

Writer and director Jim Jarmusch shot his first feature, Permanent Vacation (1980) as his final thesis at New York University's film school and spent the next four years making Stranger than Paradise.

The website's consensus reads: "A striking debut for director Jim Jarmusch, Stranger Than Paradise is an effortlessly cool exploration of finding meaning in the mundane.

Eva, who never gets to see more of New York than the drab, anonymous looking area where Willie lives, goes off to Cleveland to stay with Aunt Lotte and work at a hot-dog stand.

[13] Its success accorded Jarmusch a certain iconic status within arthouse cinema as an idiosyncratic and uncompromising auteur exuding the aura of urban cool embodied by downtown Manhattan.

[16] In 2002, Stranger Than Paradise was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".