Most people define Jim Jarmusch by the impeccably cool hipster portraits of his early films in the 1980s, such as "Down by Law" or "Mystery Train." But if you think about it, he's really been moving through a series of genre flicks for the past two decades: a Western ("Dead Man"), a gangster movie ("Ghost Dog"), a spy flick ("The Limits of Control"), even a self-realization road-trip film ("Broken Flowers"). Of course, all of these are warped, as Jarmusch likes to use genre as a flask into which he pours his own strange brew.
Flasks figure highly in "Only Lovers Left Alive," Jarmusch's stab at a vampire flick, as eternally undead couple Adam and Eve (Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton) carry around a hip flask of plasma to sip on when they're feeling the urge; as for actually biting people, well, "That's so 15th century."
Eve is in Tangiers hanging out with Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) — another vampire from way back when Shakespeare was ripping him off — when she gets a call from Adam, who is a mythic rock 'n' roll recluse living in a dilapidated, vaguely haunted-mansion sort of home studio in Detroit. He's feeling vaguely suicidal: The "zombies," as he calls normal humans, have got him down, so Eva goes to cheer him up. Her visit is interrupted by the arrival of her wild-child sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), who has a tendency to bring trouble in her wake.