If you think you can get along on your own in America, go ahead.
After casting him in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Werner Herzog built a second film around eccentric street musician Bruno S. with 1977's Stroszek, which is not exactly what you would call a "feel-good movie." It opens with Stroszek being released from prison (or, as he puts it, "entering freedom") and being warned off alcohol by the warden, so naturally he walks straight into the first bar he sees and orders a beer. It is there that he offers to take in prostitute Eva Mattes after she's spurned by her boyfriend/pimp, but no good deed goes unpunished and it isn't long before Eva's pimp and his equally cretinous friend begin terrorizing the meek Stroszek, whose life in and out of various institutions has left him ill-equipped to defend himself. So when his elderly neighbor (Clemens Scheitz from Kaspar Hauser and Heart of Glass) announces his intention to move to America to live with his nephew, Stroszek and Eva decide to go along, because how can life in rural Wisconsin be any worse than it is in Berlin?
Needless to say, the American Dream quickly turns sour for Stroszek, starting with the confiscation of his prized talking bird right after they land. He goes to work for Scheitz's nephew as a mechanic, but doesn't make enough to keep up the payments on the prefabricated house he shares with Eva. She supplements her waitressing income with the occasional trick, but that's not enough to keep the bank's insistent representative from their door, and after she leaves Stroszek (which is quite a blow since she's the only one who speaks English) the bank takes the house and auctions it and all of his possessions off. (Ralph Wade, the professional auctioneer, was one of the subjects of Herzog's 1976 documentary How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck.) Believing a conspiracy is afoot, Scheitz and Stroszek head down to the bank with one shotgun between them -- and the situation only deteriorates from there.
Hopeless as it may seem at times, the film is still dotted with the absurd touches that are Herzog's stock in trade. The driverless truck from Even Dwarfs Started Small that is started going around and around in circles makes a return appearance when Stroszek is forced to abandon it, and where Kaspar Hauser had a hypnotized chicken, Stroszek has one that dances in a roadside display alongside other performing animals. Most bizarre, though, may be Scheitz's belief that he's found a way to measure animal magnetism. Even if that were actually possible, it's hard to imagine how that would have any practical applications.