Paterson Adam Driver A NJ Transit bus driver who secretly writes poetry in a single notebook, named after the city he lives in

The Japanese Poet Masatoshi Nagase A poet from Osaka on a pilgrimage to the city of his literary hero, William Carlos Williams

The Great Falls of the Passaic River, Paterson's favorite spot and the place where he goes to write.

This scene arrives at Paterson's lowest point, his dog has just destroyed the only notebook containing all his poems. He sits devastated at the falls when this stranger appears and, through gentle conversation, reaffirms that being a bus driver and being a poet aren't contradictory. Dubuffet was a meteorologist; Williams was a doctor.

Jarmusch cast Nagase deliberately, the same actor who visited Memphis as an Elvis pilgrim in Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989) is now visiting Paterson as a Williams pilgrim, 25 years later.

The Ron Padgett poems voiced by Paterson throughout the film deliberately echo William Carlos Williams' conversational, unrhymed style.

The "fish" poem at the end is a meta-statement about the film's own method, Jarmusch extracts one quiet week from a bus driver's life the way the poem extracts one line from a song, as if the rest didn't have to be there.

The Japanese Poet functions as a kind of secular angel, arriving at the exact moment of creative death to hand Paterson the most elemental tool: an empty page.

This is the pivotal closing scene from Paterson (2016) written and directed by Jim Jarmusch