I once traveled for two days from Windhoek to Swakopmund through theKalahari Desert, on a train without air conditioning, sleeping at night on ahard leather bench that swung down from the ceiling. That journey seemed alittle shorter than the one that opens ``Dead Man,'' the new film by JimJarmusch.

In the mid- to late 1800s, a man named William Blake (Johnny Depp) istraveling from Cleveland, where his parents have just died, to the Western townof Machine, where he has been promised a job. He is dressed in a checked suitthat looks as if it had been waiting a long time in the menswear store for asucker to come along. The train drones through the endless prairie. There areshots of the inside of the train. Shots of the view from the train. Shots of thetrain. Then the train's soot-faced fireman warns Blake that his grave awaits himin Machine.

For some of my readers, the name William Blake will have rung a bell,and they will be wondering if there is any connection between this character andthe mystical British poet who died in 1827. There is: They both have the samename. Our Blake has not heard of the English Blake, however, but before long hewill run into an Indian named Nobody who can quote him by the yard.

We are getting ahead of the story. Blake arrives in Machine and reportsto the Dickinson Steel Works, a dark, satanic mill where he expects to beemployed as an accountant. The office manager (John Hurt) explains that the jobno longer exists. Blake is appalled; he's spent his last dime getting there. Heconfronts the owner of the mill (Robert Mitchum), who stands between a stuffedbear and a portrait of himself, which frame his fearful symmetry. Mitchumbrandishes a shotgun and advises Blake to leave.

Blake befriends a hapless flower girl, and is invited to her room for anencounter between innocence and experience. Then the girl's lover bursts in andshoots her. Blake shoots the man, is shot near the heart, leaps from the window,and flees. We discover the dead man is Dickinson's son, and the mill owner hiresmen to track and kill Blake.

The next morning Blake regains consciousness in the forest to find hiswound being tended by the Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who was raised bywhite men, educated in England, and treats Blake as if he really is the poet.

The two men now undertake an odyssey, pursued by the killers, in search ofBlake's ultimate destiny, which is revealed as a pleasing cross between themysticism of the original Blake and the American Indians.

``Dead Man'' is a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us withmore time to think about its meaning than with meaning. The black and whitephotography by Robby Muller is a series of monochromes in which the brave newland of the West already betrays a certain loneliness. Farmer brings to theIndian a sweetness and a curious contemporary air (he talks like a new ageguru), and Depp is sad and lost as the opposite of Nobody--which is, I fear,Everyman. A mood might have developed here, had it not been for the unfortunatescore by Neil Young, which for the film's final 30 minutes sounds like nothingso much as a man repeatedly dropping his guitar.

Jim Jarmusch is trying to get at something here, and I don't have aclue what it is. Are the machines of the East going to destroy the nature of the West? Is the white man doomed, and is the Indian his spiritual guide to thefarther shore? Should you avoid any town that can't use another accountant?Watching the film, I was reminded of the original William Blake's visionarydrawings and haunting poems. Leaving the theater, I came home and took down myBlake and spent a very pleasant half-hour. So the evening was not a loss.