MOVIE REVIEW : After Long Drive, ‘Leningrad Cowboys’ Leave No Brand

It’s curious that Aki Kaurismaki’s “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” (1990) would be picked as part of the Festival of Arts’ “Windows Onto an American Landscape” series because the movie really has so little to do with this country.

The band of Russian musicians who travel across the United States in this tall tale/road movie aren’t at all interested in America. They don’t learn anything about it, and Finnish director Kaurismaki avoids any comment or insight, as if they’d contaminate his cockeyed film.

The inside joke in “Leningrad Cowboys” (being shown tonight at the Festival Forum Theatre) is that the band may look hip and happening (with their weird hair and frozen style, these musicians are like a collision of ZZ Top and ultra-punk), but they’re actually so out of it that they don’t even know what rock ‘n’ roll is.

Along the way, they learn to mimic rock standards (brutally, from “That’s All Right, Mama” to “Tequila” to “Born to Be Wild”) but they never feel the music. If Kaurismaki is making any sort of statement, it’s that foreigners have a tough time adapting to the American way.

Mainly, though, his movie is about vacuity and pointlessness, wrapped in peculiar imagery. “Leningrad Cowboys” is an existential comic book redeemed somewhat by the steadfastness of Kaurismaki’s goofball vision of things.

One of our own fringe directors, Jim Jarmusch, shows up briefly as a deadpan used-car salesman, and his cameo is perfect. His acting isn’t much more telling than anyone else’s, but Jarmusch evokes linkages between his own directing style and Kaurismaki’s.

These two may have been separated at birth, cinematic twins who ended up on different continents. Jarmusch is more of a chronicler of social seediness than Kaurismaki (whose other films, like his earlier “Shadows in Paradise” and “Ariel,” are politically tilted) but the directors share an infatuation with the dispassionate, and with understatement to the point of not being stated at all.

The most amusing aspect of “Leningrad Cowboys” is how the boys look. Their black hair stands out horizontally like a collection of weather vanes and they wear obscenely pointed shoes, like Beatle boots from another planet. On stage, they jerk around in dark suits, trying desperately to connect with the music. Kaurismaki may have seen one too many “Blues Brothers” segments on “Saturday Night Live.”

The band pulls into towns like Galveston, Tex., and Langtry, Miss., en route to a wedding gig in Mexico and usually embarrasses itself in the local bars. The boys cart around a dead brother in a coffin tied to their beat-up Cadillac, and drink beer and eat onions. Not much else happens. They don’t have a clue, and the action is somnambulistic.

Still, it’s funny to watch these nonentities move through a blurry landscape that doesn’t change them in the slightest. It’s the humor of seeing something bizarre in a thoroughly mundane setting. “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” doesn’t mean much of anything, but it invites us to gape.

“Leningrad Cowboys Go America” is being shown tonight at 6 and 9 at the Festival Forum Theatre on the Festival of Arts grounds, 650 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. $4 and $5. (714) 494-1145.