In his new film, Only Lovers Left Alive, director Jim Jarmusch tackles loneliness, alienation, and ennui through the persons of two star-crossed, globetrotting, art-loving vampires. The film's been getting strong reviews, but this isn't the first time the American indie icon has wrapped the immediate and the immortal in the conventions of genre storytelling. Fifteen years ago next month, the groundbreaking Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai was released.

Part samurai saga, part gangster tale, and part noir tragedy, with a healthy measure of hip-hop street drama thrown in for good measure. Ghost Dog was, and is, a forward-thinking gem that recognizes the impact seemingly random artistic traditions can have on one another, and the way those disparate parts can combine to form a new, color-blind whole. It's a multicultural Obama-era film, born in an earlier, pre-Obama era. And while it didn't make much of an impression on the world at large (scattered critical acclaim, a few million box office), it's well overdue for another look.

At its core, Ghost Dog is about the decline of two age-old traditions: The mafia, and the samurai. The story is simple. There's a black hitman named Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), who does steady work for the mob—or what's left of it—and who lives by the tenets of the (made up) book Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai. When one of his assignments goes wrong, his clownish former employees who can't make rent and spend most of their time watching cartoons, come hunting for him. That places him in an awkward spot, since his code of honor says that he cannot harm his master Louie (John Tormey), a schlubby mid-level mobster who years earlier saved Ghost Dog's life. Ghost Dog communicates with Louie via carrier pigeon, and spends his days on his high-rise rooftop practicing his blade and hand-to-hand combat techniques, which Jarmusch and regular cinematographer Robby Müller shoot with the same ghostly jump-fade transitions that mark the rest of the proceedings.

Ghost Dog's violence is swift and brutal, but staged with a stylized, hallucinatory grace that's less about delivering vicarious thrills than about casting its hero as a man defined by action and ritual. In its quieter moments, though, the film moves slowly, with dreamlike momentum. Ghost Dog befriends a young girl named Pearline (Camille Winbush)—to whom he gives a copy of Rashomon, which he borrowed from a mafia boss' daughter during the aforementioned botched job. He hangs out with his best friend Raymond (Isaach De Bankolé), a French ice cream truck man who speaks no English but remains on Ghost Dog's exact wavelength. Young and old, French and American, Eastern samurai and Western gangsters—despite their apparent differences, all are the same here in a film that harmonizes genders, generations and cultures under the same brooding umbrella.

The film's interest in fusing seemingly incompatible materials into something new and unique is shared by hip-hop—which is defined by the melding of incongruous elements. It's no surprise, then, that hip-hop itself is perhaps the most profound influence on the proceedings. Specifically, the (kung-fu-movie-loving) Wu-Tang Clan, whose ringleader/producer RZA provides the score and makes a brief, salutational cameo. The Wu-Tang's music ably reflects the laid-back cool—and swift, sudden, lethality—of the film's streetwise protagonist, but more important, it provides a fitting soundtrack for a tale that situates and reimagines noir and Asian-action conventions in a gritty NYC of run-down bodegas and pigeon coop rooftops.

This milieu—itself a fading memory in contemporary New York—provides a perfect setting for Jarmusch's examination of how the past, present, and future conspire to cultivate, perpetuate, and ultimately unravel tradition. The old ways eventually fall away, as we're told in a Pearline-centric coda (after a middle-of-the-road showdown that, of course, directly references High Noon), but, in the end, they're always ready to be reborn again.

BONUS: 3 MORE OF OUR FAVORITE MOMENTS IN GHOST DOG ...

AND ITS AMAZING SOUNDTRACK ...

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Nick Schager Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t.

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