Everything in Wrong Move happens as if by magic-or as if previously written in the pages of another book. While situated in a mundanely real modern Germany, the narrative is entirely anti-realistic.

A bitter, deadpan parody of all things Romantic, Wenders's film is also so ironic about its own emptiness that it ends up being something pure: a pop dirge about how never sitting still may be the only answer to meaninglessness.

Wenders looks at young rockers through a lens of high culture and applies the theatrical fervor of the Enlightenment to the rumpled rounds of modern buskers.

Angsty and languorous, time has granted the film a rather potent mixture of melancholy and historical significance, which enhances a seemingly glacial pace of continuous walking and talking about poetry, dreams, and loneliness.