Permanent Vacation

Permanent Vacation (1981) is Jim Jarmusch's debut feature — shot on twelve thousand dollars across the broken streets of Lower Manhattan — and you can watch it online as a document of a director finding his voice in real time. Everything that would later define Jarmusch is already present: the drifting pace, the deadpan, the obsession with outsiders. It just hasn't been polished yet.

Allie is somewhere in his early twenties. No fixed address, no father, mother in a psychiatric institution. For roughly two and a half days he wanders the Lower East Side, talking to a Vietnam veteran, watching people on stoops, failing to connect and not seeming bothered by it. He's devoted to Charlie Parker — Bird's restless movement from city to city reads to him like a blueprint for something, though he couldn't say exactly what. John Lurie, who would soon co-found the Lounge Lizards, turns up in a small role.

The New York of 1981 is half the film — derelict blocks, crumbling facades, a city that had genuinely run out of money. Jarmusch didn't set out to document it, but forty years later that's what he captured. Stream Permanent Vacation (1981) online on iFILM.