"Coffee and cigarettes," says Iggy Pop to Tom Waits. "Now there's a combination."

Pause for a moment to consider the combination of Tom Waits and Iggy Pop. It's as good as you might imagine, perhaps better.

Anyway, in that particular segment of Jim Jarmusch's new film, the two musicians, playing versions of themselves, sip their coffee in a diner and notice a pack of cigarettes a previous customer has left on the table. They congratulate each other on quitting smoking before acknowledging the fact that, having overcome the hurdle of quitting, they can indulge in a smoke now and then. They each light up, and exhale rather ecsatically, and take another sip of coffee.

It took me a few tries to realize the fallacy of that particular privledge, and as I write this, it's been about 727 days since I smoked what I still plan to be the last cigarette I'll ever smoke; it's been about one hour since my last cup of coffee, and probably about eight to ten hours before my morning brew starts percolating. I won't quit drinking coffee, I don't miss smoking, but I can't forget that they are, indeed, quite a combination. There's something poetic about it; two elements, fire and water, laced with potent, effervescent textures that inspire, some form of higher thought; smoke floats through the chambers of your body, coffee warms your throat and embraces your heart, and sitting back, partaking in both, feels tantamount to reading a great novel.

That's mostly what this film is about: interesting people talking about the same thing. Jarmusch has been filming little vignettes about the two substances and the various people who partake in them for nearly twenty years now, and here they all are, compiled into a cohesive whole that is an utter joy to indulge in. Most of the vignettes feature actors or musicians who have appeared in his films; the first scene, filmed for Saturday Night Live in 1986, finds Roberto Begnini, who before gaining national recognition at the Oscars gave memorable performances in Jarmusch's Down By Law' and Night On Earth, paired with his comic opposite, Stephen Wright. With hands shaking from too many cappucinos, they talk about drinking coffee before sleeping so they can dream faster.

Later, the Wu Tang Clan's GZA and the RZA (who composed the music to Jarmusch's Ghost Dog) tell Bill Murray that they do the same thing. Bill Murray, for whatever reason, is playing himself working at a diner, and guzzles coffee straight from the pot while the Wu members extoll the health risks of caffeine and smoking. They practice alternative medicine when they're not recording music, you see, because music and medicine are both very similar things. Tom Waits, we've already learned, shares this belief.

None of these pieces are actual stories, and none of them would work as stand alone films (although, being vignettes, they'd all work fine as such without or without accompaniment) -- except for the last one, entitled Champagne, in which to elderly men take a break from an unspecified job to enjoy a cup of weak joe and a smoke and wonder if they're really hearing a Mahler concerto drifting through the air. The two men are played by Bill Rice and Taylor Mead, who both exude such history that you don't need to know anything about them to know everything about them (in real life, they're both longtime underground actors/artists, and Mead used to be part of the Andy Warhol scene). It's a bittersweet, sublime bit of filmmaking that ranks with Jarmusch's best work.

I also greatly enjoyed the meeting between Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina, which is the slickest and most crowd-pleasing of the bunch. The segment which seems to exist simply to prove again what an amazing actress Cate Blanchett is by casting her as herself and her cousin is also amazing, in that you literally cannot convince yourself that there aren't two separate people on the screen talking to each other. And the scene with the White Stripes competently discussing a Tesla coil is funny in the same way that Britney Spears explaining semiconductor physics (do a Google search on it) is funny. There are more, some that don't stand out as much, none which are not entirely enjoyable.

Seeing this movie will likely make you want to sit dwon and talk to someone afterwards; it captures the spark of the best conversations, and the awkwardness of the worst, and the solutions and misunderstandings and misapprehensions and triumphs that can result from both. Jarmusch has said that he plans to keep making these little shorts, in between features, when the mood strikes him. It's a brilliant idea, and there's no subject better for rumination than this. Coffee and cigarettes are simple, but they're a conduit. Poets in the nineteenth century had their absinthe. This is what we've got. Provided you haven't quit.