Leningrad Cowboys Go America

Aki Kaurismäki's Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989) is the deadpan cult comedy that introduced his most absurd creation: a fictional band whose ludicrous hairstyles and shoes became a running visual gag, and who went on to play real concerts, among them a famous collaboration with the Red Army Choir.

The plot is slender. Managed by a tyrannical huckster, the group crosses America in search of an audience for music nobody wants, dragging a coffin with them and adapting the repertoire to whatever each bar will put up with. Kaurismäki shoots the journey as a string of static, mournfully funny tableaux, and the frozen faces of his players against the bleak American roadside produce a melancholy comedy that nobody else makes. Matti Pellonpää and the regular Kaurismäki troupe play it with magnificent po-faced commitment.

It became an international cult hit, cemented Kaurismäki's reputation abroad and turned the Leningrad Cowboys into a real touring act, one of the rare fictional bands to escape their film. He later reunited them for sequels and live spectacles, but this is the original and still the best of them. For anyone new to the director, Leningrad Cowboys Go America is the ideal way in: a road movie about failure, drily hilarious and forlorn, played with such conviction that it becomes, improbably, both very funny and rather moving.