DJ Zack (Tom Waits) and pimp Jack (John Lurie) have the hep con blues. Framed for crimes they would be too slack to commit, they land in a shared cell in Orleans Parish Prison. Then Roberto comes along. This inexplicable, irrepressible naïf (Roberto Benigni, then little known in the United States), an Italian magpie of American idioms, transports Jarmusch's self-described “neo-Beat noir comedy” into the realm of fractured fairy tale. Soon Jack, Zack, and Bob are off on a picaresque jailbreak journey, drifting in circles through the bayou toward a happy ending “like in a book for children” . . . kind of. Lensed in gorgeous black and white by Robby Müller, the film was shot on location around New Orleans, but as Luc Sante wrote, “the actual setting is no more Louisiana than the setting of Macao is Macao. Down by Law takes place in the land of the imagination, in the province of the movies.”
—Juliet Clark