As a longstanding subscriber to various men's magazines (no, not that sort), I am regularly presented with dreary articles about fashion icons of the big screen - dreary because they always turn up the same old faces, in the same old clothes, in the same old films.

Oh look, another feature about how cool Steve McQueen was, illustrated with - surprise, surprise - a picture of him in a cream-coloured Barracuta G9 Harrington. And who's that overleaf? Why it's Michael Caine in his role as Harry Palmer or Jack Carter, the only Geordie ever born with a Cockney accent. Bo-ring.

But on a trip to the cinema this week I am reminded of a true fashion icon who features too rarely in these lists - John Lurie, the hipster's hipster, a jazz musician and painter who also stars in two of the best films Jim Jarmusch ever made, Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law.

Made in black and white in 1984, Stranger Than Paradise is basically a road movie involving two New York racetrack hustlers - Hungarian-American Willy and pal Eddie, played by Lurie and Richard Edson - who hook up with Willy's cousin Eva (Eszter Balint). Obsessed with the music of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, she has arrived in New York from Budapest and is on her way to a new life with Willy's Aunt Lotte in Cleveland. She makes it to Ohio but Willy and Eddie follow her and whisk her off to Florida in a car they have "borrowed" from someone called Max. Think Jules Et Jim meets Jon Cassavetes's Beat Generation masterpiece, Shadows.

Now one of the reasons Lurie does not feature in these screen style icon lists is that his "look" is unachievable to most ordinary mortals. His effortless cool is as much about his long-limbed gait - somewhere between a mooch and a limp - and the way he gesticulates with his hands as it is the clothes on his back. In the closing scenes in Florida he wears a pair of sunglasses that could only look good on him and for most of the rest of the film he is clad in a series of horrible thrift-shop shirts, weird trousers held up with braces, a trilby, filthy sneakers and, for the scenes in wintry Cleveland, preposterous snow boots. It shouldn't work, but does - a good definition of style.

In Down By Law, meanwhile, Jarmusch recruits Lurie again for a Louisiana-set tale about what, if it were true, would be the weirdest and most inept jailbreak in American penal history. The director also pulls off what I think is the most audacious piece of casting in cinematic history: he teams Lurie with that other icon of musical cool, Tom Waits. It's testament to Lurie's atomic-powered hipness he steals virtually every scene.

Check it out for yourself. Down By Law is at the Glasgow Film Theatre next week and both it and Stranger Than Paradise are in a new DVD collection of five early Jarmusch films out on October 6 (Soda Pictures, £64.99). If you can emulate Lurie, I take my trilby off to you: if not, just enjoy watching a man who makes even answering the phone look stylish.

The Jim Jarmusch season runs at the Edinburgh Filmhouse until November 1.