Slacker (1991)

Richard Linklater‘s low-key debut Slacker. He constructed the 1991 film as a series of set pieces — some irreverent, some meandering, and some bizarre, but most all of them with stealthily universal resonance — taking place across the college town of Austin, Texas. Douglas Coupland having coined the term “Generation X” with his eponymous novel less than four months before, the North American zeitgeist had come to take serious, if smirking, notice of all these slouchy twenty-somethings who seemed to turn up without warning, spouting endless streams of ideas, theories, wisecracks, and elaborate plans, yet drained of anything recognizable as ambition. These slackers, as we now call them without hesitation, make up the dramatis personæ of Slacker.

Austin, Texas, is an Eden for the young and unambitious, from the enthusiastically eccentric to the dangerously apathetic. Here, the nobly lazy can eschew responsibility in favor of nursing their esoteric obsessions. The locals include a backseat philosopher who passionately expounds on his dream theories to a seemingly comatose cabbie, a young woman who tries to hawk Madonna's Pap test to anyone who will listen and a kindly old anarchist looking for recruits.

(Click on the image for the full film)