Starring Adam Driver. Rated PG

Turning poetry into film is a tricky proposition. The self-directed contemplation of words on paper is intrinsically opposed to the real-time momentum of motion pictures.

Over a period of four decades, though, writer-director Jim Jarmusch has made clear his disdain for cinematic norms while asserting his sly love of language. In films like Dead Man, there was minimal verbiage attached to nearly static imagery. But other movies, like Down by Law, were built on the nearly musical jousting of urban raconteurs.

All the director’s impulses came crashing together in 2013’s Only Lovers Left Alive, which combined vampires, pop-culture and social commentary, and delirious map-and-time-hopping. In Paterson, Jarmusch changes direction again and limits himself to just a few people and places. The seemingly straightforward new film is in colour, but only just.

Frederick Elmes, who previously shot things as stylistically varied as Blue Velvet and The Ice Storm, sticks to muted, warmer tones, recalling faded family snapshots from the 1970s. That approach fits the scrapbook life of a young couple in titular Paterson, New Jersey—home, at various times, to Allen Ginsberg, Lou Costello, and William Carlos Williams.

The insularity of their happily bungalowed, almost childlike existence is underlined by the fact that this is also the family name of the main character, a hesitant, self-contained fellow played by Adam Driver. In fact, Paterson (no first name given) is a driver—of buses, circling through the city core and industrial outskirts on the same route every day.

He’s also a secret poet. Paterson doesn’t talk much, but he listens a lot, to passengers and to the patrons who frequent the bar he visits most nights, while walking the French bulldog he silently detests.

The dog doesn’t like him, either, as Paterson is his rival for the affections of wife Laura (Iranian rising star Golshifteh Farahani), who stays home, working on new creations—most of which involve painting geometric shapes in black and white. Paterson has a little nook in the basement where he fills a notebook with sweet, calculatedly naive lines of nonrhyming verse—itself shaping the flow of the story.

That maybe sounds a little plain and small-scale, but Paterson is the anti–Manchester by the Sea, full of regard for the little things that warm its people’s lives, and real respect for the ways they attempt to reach beyond their limitations, through creativity and humour. Their dreams are small, and so are their setbacks.

When Paterson loses some of his recent work, he declares that poetry is “just words, written on water”. And sometimes on film.