February 7, 1990 | It's a downtown bar on a corner somewhere between Little Italy and The Bowery, pretty much your typical no-frills, working-class neighborhood joint. Even if you normally order an Evian, or white wine, you feel compelled to ask for a beer and a shot.

An eccentric touch: Huge sharks, hammerheads and great whites that must have been hell to catch, have been mounted and hung on the walls. Otherwise, the place is nondescript. The walls are two-tone, a cream overlaid with grime and soot, and a brown like a chocolate Easter Bunny forgotten in a far corner of the refrigerator. There are faded plaid, plastic tablecloths on the tables, some gray metal folding chairs, and two or three customers in animated conversation near the back. The jukebox has '50s platters by Frank Sinatra, and, occasionally, someone drops a quarter in the slot.

It's an overcast afternoon in early December, and most of the patrons are up at the bar. A woman of indeterminate age, anywhere from late 30s to early 60s, is talking about her dog's eating habits, and the bartender hangs on every word, occasionally talking about his own pet. Every so often, he excuses himself to ring up a tab on an ancient cash register that has index card-sized religious pictures -- various saints, some of them carrying the infant Jesus -- taped above the cash drawer.
 
And in walks Jim Jarmusch, the maverick moviemaker who lives down the street. The bartender nods slightly in greeting. To him, Jarmusch is just another regular. The only difference, sometimes, like this afternoon, Jarmusch sits at a table near the window, and talks to someone with a tape recorder.

The Spring Lounge could be used as a set -- maybe even the set -- in one of Jarmusch's deadpan comedies. Willie and Eddie, the two low-rent gamblers from Stranger Than Paradise, could be nursing drinks at the bar, while Eva, Willie's Hungarian cousin, searched the jukebox playlist for Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Roberto Benigni, the effervescent Italian tourist of Down By Law, might wander into the joint, searching for American idioms to record in his notebook. Zack and Jack, with whom he shared a prison cell in New Orleans, might be seated at a corner table, trying to remain inconspicuous.

Mystery Train, Jarmusch's latest film, tells three separate but intertwined stories about a long night of misadventure in a seedy Memphis hotel. In ''Far from Yokohama,'' two teen-age Japanese tourists visit the Tennessee city to pay tribute to their favorite American music stars (Elvis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins, among others). In ''A Ghost,'' Nicoletta Braschi (the Earth Mother of Down By Law) plays a visiting Italian sharing an Arcade Hotel room with a motor-mouthed young woman who's leaving her boyfriend. During the night, her slumber is interrupted by Elvis himself. Elvis is genuinely sorry about the intrusion -- he meant to appear somewhere else.  In ''Lost in Space,'' a lovesick Englishman, his American brother-in-law, and their streetwise black friend blunder into a night of heavy drinking and sudden violence. They, too, wind up at the Arcade.

And just like the other characters in Mystery Train, they, too, could have stopped at the Spring Lounge. The stuffed sharks probably would have impressed them.

''Yeah, Mystery Train could have taken place in another city,'' says Jarmusch, dressed in his favorite colors -- black, gray and more black -- but sounding more relaxed and amiable than he usually comes across in magazine profiles. ''Just details would have had to be changed. Obviously, Elvis and certain things about Memphis, I wouldn't have kept them. But the story basically could have worked. What happens between the stories in each section could have worked in Newark.''

Jarmusch wrote Down By Law before he ever visited New Orleans. He simply wrote about a New Orleans of the mind, then went to the city to find locations that matched his imagination. He took the same approach to making Mystery Train.

 ''I like the location being imaginary, until I'm done with the story,'' Jarmusch says. ''Because the characters have to work for me first.'' Only after the characters are fully defined does he worry about giving them something to do. ''And then,'' he says, ''the idea of the structure comes to me.'' Where the story is set, ultimately, is a minor concern. ''If you travel on the backstreets, and look for places that are not clichéd, I think there are interesting places almost everywhere.''

And even more interesting characters. So interesting, in fact, Jarmusch doesn't want to tell us everything he might know about them.
 
''It's impossible for me to think of a story in which, in the end, everything's tied up, and the curtains close, and that's it. Unless the character were to actually die in the story, then I want the character to exist after the film's over. If it ends with the figurative curtain closing on the story, and that's it, to me it's like figuratively killing off the characters. And I don't want them dead. I want them to be still continuing their adventure when the film is over.
 
''In the same way, when it begins, we just sort of pick them up, and they're already in some train of events, and we just sort of jump in at that point . . . Even the way we use the camera is kind of observational. I just want the audience to step in, and follow the story for a while, and then step out again. But the story should still be continuing in their imagination. I hope.''

In each of his three major features to date, Jarmusch gazes at everyday life on the fringes through the eyes of outsiders, and finds the view utterly exotic. Whether the location be a tacky Florida hotel in the dead of winter, or a row of ramshackle buildings on a Memphis street at twilight, Jarmusch's characters -- often foreign-born, always displaced -- find what they see at once familiar and fantastic.

One of the young Japanese tourists in Mystery Train takes photographs of every hotel room and airport that he and his girlfriend find during their cross-country journey. Why not take pictures of Sun Studios? Or Graceland? ''Those things are in my memory,'' he explains to his girlfriend. ''The airports and the hotel rooms -- those things I forget.''
 
Jarmusch, 36, was born in Akron, Ohio, a long way, in many different ways, from New York. Even after nearly two decades in Manhattan, does he feel like a foreigner? ''Hah!'' Jarmusch replies, with just a suggestion of a smile. ''I felt like a foreigner in Akron.''

Really? ''Yeah, I always felt like an outsider in school, and as a kid. I don't know, I've always felt that way. But it's less me than my attraction to those kinds of characters.''

His parents, alive and well and living near Columbus, were major influences, sort of. During his boyhood, Jarmusch's mother, a former entertainment writer for the Akron Beacon Journal, used to drop Jimmy off at the local moviehouse each Saturday afternoon. (While he enjoyed double bills and hot popcorn, Mom shopped.) His father, a sheet-metal worker who recently designed display cases for the Smithsonian Institute, liked to take the family -- including Jim's sister, Ann, now an art critic for the Dallas Times-Herald -- on long, long auto trips.
 
''I never really have thought about it too much,'' Jarmusch says during a pause in his chain smoking. ''But, yeah, I guess I've been influenced quite a bit by (the family vacations), to some degree. Especially in Stranger Than Paradise. Because when we used to take vacations, my family would stay in little motels. We would drive two days to go to Florida, and we would end up in a motel that looked like we could have been 10 miles outside of Akron, where we left. The landscape didn't really change all that much. This amused me, and yet it was also kind of an adventure.

''And now, it's like, I love Italy, and I go there at least once a year, to stay in Rome with friends, Roberto and Nicoletta. But I'm always amazed by the cabdrivers driving past the Coliseum and all these incredible ruins. To them, they might as well be driving past the Burger King, because they're so used to it. And that really amazes me.

''But you know, I sometimes have that same sense of amazement in a place like this, or in Memphis, on some back street. To me, it seems exotic somehow. I have this mythological sense of Memphis. And it stays with me, even though, to a lot of people, when they see the film, they'll say, 'This is just some rundown street, it's nowhere.'

''I try to pick locations that have some kind of magic for me.''
 
Jarmusch appears uncomfortable when asked to explain or analyze his films, as though he fears that, by doing so, he might spoil the magic. Over the course of a long conversation, he might describe Down By Law as ''a children's story for adults,'' or briefly describe the symbolism behind the title Mystery Train: ''It's three stories, as though they are three separate cars on a train that are all taking the same journey . . . And yet, if you're on a train with other people, and they're in another car, you've made the same journey, and yet you don't meet them, and your experience is completely different.''
 
Even as he speaks, however, Jarmusch looks and sounds like a man who's slightly embarrassed, who fears he's made a pompous speech when he should instead let his pictures do the talking. He instinctively recoils from the pretentious, and positively hates being labeled ''hip,'' among other things, by trend-spotting journalists: ''If I see one more interview with me that's titled 'Terminally Hip' or 'Cool' or whatever, it's gonna drive me nuts. To me, it's like a badge that other people put on, and it's sort of their game.''

Only when pressed on the subject will Jarmusch speak about himself. As a teen-ager, he had literary ambitions: He read Rimbaud and Baudelaire, ''in translations, of course,'' and decided ''I wanted to be a poet who dressed like Zorro.'' During his final year at Columbia University, however, he spent a semester in Paris, where he frequented the film revival theaters, continuing an education he began in New York.
 
''When I lived in Akron,'' he says, ''all I saw was Godzilla Versus Megalon and James Bond movies.'' In New York and Paris, however, he saw movies by members of the French New Wave -- Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut -- ''and I realized that cinema had as many possibilities -- at least stylistically and thematically -- as literature did.''

So when he returned to the United States, Jarmusch applied for the graduate film school at New York University. ''And I was accepted with a scholarship because I didn't have any money. So I just said, 'OK, I'm doing this, I'm gonna try it and see what happens.'

''And then I was able to be Nicholas Ray's teaching assistant. And through him, I met Wim Wenders, and worked on the film Lightning Over Water that they made together. And through Nick Ray, I met other people in the film world -- Sam Fuller, and so on. And then I made my first film, Permanent Vacation, and was able to go to Europe with the film, and met more people.
 
''After I made my first film, though, I thought, 'Well, at least I got to make one. But that's it. I'll never get to do it again.' But then suddenly, people were saying, 'We'd like to invite you to this festival with your film.' And I said, 'What? And you'll pay my air fare?'

''It just kind of happened. And kept happening.''
 
And even now, people keep coming to his neighborhood bar to talk about it.