Come as you are; Bill Murray plays an easygoing rogue in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, while Michael Pitt is Kurt Cobain in Gus Van Sant's Last Days.(Movie Review)

Back in the eighties, when Bill Murray was America's favorite smart aleck, who would ever have guessed that he'd become an icon of middle-aged soulfulness? He taps that well once again in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, an enjoyably bittersweet comedy that won the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes film festival. Murray stars as Don Johnston, a disaffected suburban lothario (complete with Fred Perry tracksuit) who gets a letter from an anonymous ex-lover informing him that two decades earlier, he fathered her son. To find out which woman it is (there have been so many), he starts tracking down his girlfriends from that period, including a badly married real-estate agent (Frances Conroy), a scary "animal communicator" (Jessica Lange), and a merry widow (Sharon Stone) with a jailbait daughter named Lolita.

Flirting with the cutesy without quite succumbing, Broken Flowers is the most overtly commercial picture ever made by Jarmusch, whose 1984 indie hit Stranger than Paradise set the template for a whole era of international hipster cinema-they're still mimicking his deadpan poetry in Iceland and Uruguay. While it's his limitation that he's lousy at telling stories, Jarmusch is great at creating wonderful moments around his star: Murray's drolly fastidious way of forking an unsavory cooked carrot, his teasing the pet psychic's cat, his brief, tender exchange with a flower-shop girl (played by the fine up-and-coming actress Pell James). Even as Jarmusch wins vivid performances from his lead ...