A hopeful young writer travels through Germany’s palaces and projects to find inspiration in Wenders’s second road film, loosely based on Goethe’s Wilhem Meister’s Apprenticeship and filmed in painterly long takes. “I’d like to be a writer, but is that possible if I have no interest in people?” muses Wilhem, but those he meets—including an ex-Nazi, an actress (Hanna Schygulla), a poet, and a young girl (Nastassja Kinski, in her debut)—provide inspiration, and insight into the sorrow of Germany’s past and the futility of its present. Wenders “turns a self-consciously casual ramble into a vast soul-searching” (The New Yorker).