Thoughts on Leningrad Cowboys Go America

     On Criterion, I watched the 1989 Finnish road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America, written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, about a fictional band called the Leningrad Cowboys, who were from the Siberian tundra and had exaggerated pompadour/mullet hairstyles (also called a quiff, from the 1950s British Teddy Boy movement), long Winklepicker shoes. They're trying to make it as a working band, playing their version of polka with guitars and horns. Their manager Vladimir (Matti Pellonpää) is trying to promote them, but they keep getting shuffled around to different countries and markets. A Russian man tells them to go to America, that "they'll buy anything" there. They head to New York City, followed by Igor (Kari Kyösti Väänänen), the mute village idiot who they don't invite along but he stows away anyway. They bring along their band member who had frozen outside while practicing music, and carry him in a coffin with them and tie the box to the top of their used Cadillac limousine.

    In New York City, they go to CBGB's, and the manager takes a listen, then tells them to go to Mexico to play at a wedding, and to change their music, that Americans like rock music. So the band goes on the road to drive from New York to Mexico, playing bar gigs along the way, and learning to adapt to the U.S. and local tastes. When they encounter a rough biker crowd at one bar, they switch to playing "Born to Be Wild" to win them over. At a bar on the Mexican border, they play "Tequila" to please the Mexican audience. They add rockabilly riffs to their music, blending in with their retro 1950s hairstyles. 

    It's a quirky and unusual movie, and the director Jim Jarmusch has a cameo as a car salesman from whom they buy the limousine, and Jarmusch's films seem like a clear influence on how Kaurismäki sees America, like with his 1980s films Down by Law and Stranger Than Paradise. The film has title cards marking the days and locations of the band's road trip, and at one point, they get arrested for a minor crime, and spend five days in jail, and the sequence is a montage of them in the jail cell banging beer cans and making music with them, with "third day" and "fifth day" punctuating in-between, until the cops just let them go, likely just to get rid of them.

    I've seen a couple of Kaurismäki's films, like Le Havre (2011) and Fallen Leaves (2023). He's a really interesting and funny filmmaker, with a deadpan sense of humor, finding humor in mundane yet offbeat moments. I had heard of this film from the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, where the hosts, William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, who are film critics, did an episode listing their Top Ten lists of favorite road trip movies, and one of them included Leningrad Cowboys Go America, and it sounded weird and funny and interesting to me. This stood out as a droll and standout film of the late 1980s, which got a sequel in 1994, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses. I'm glad that I checked out this odd film.