Slacker

Directed by: Richard Linklater

RS: Not Rated

1991 Comedy

Slacker

608/09 7-11-91
Richard Linklater, the twenty-eight-year-old writer and director of this scrappy and shrewdly hilarious first film, is also the first person we see onscreen. He's just stepped off a bus in the college town of Austin, Texas. In a cab, he harangues the driver with a wacko monologue about Dorothy and the Scarecrow's decision to dance off in one direction when they come to a crossroads in The Wizard of Oz. "But," he says, "all those other directions, just because they thought about them, became separate realities."

That's slackerspeak, and Linklater has a keen ear for its rhythm. He's well acquainted with the people who speak it, members of the new generation of postgraduates who have made a lifestyle of keeping the job market at bay. "I may live badly," says a hitchhiker, "but at least I don't have to work to do it." The New York Times calls this national subculture "neo-beatniks." Linklater calls them "slackers" and introduces us to more than a hundred verbose local specimens in this non-narrative film, which takes place over the course of twenty-four hours in the streets, shops, bars, coffeehouses and apartments of Austin.

These slackers, mostly twentysome-thing, are played largely by amateurs whom Linklater -- a native Texan -- recruited from among friends, on-the-street interviewees and local bands such as Butthole Surfers and Glass Eye. The performances are remarkably natural, though there is no improvisation. Linklater's script (based on notes he's kept from overheard conversations) invests the funny, scary, silly, canny, schizoid, paranoid and provocative raps of these slackers with a fluky poetry. One man, who carries a TV on his back, lists the drawbacks of reality as compared with a video image: "I can't press rewind, I can't put it on pause, I can't put it on slo-mo and see all the little details." A woman tries to sell two friends a lab jar containing what she claims is a Madonna Pap smear and a pubic hair. "It gets you a little closer to the rock god herself than a poster," she says.

Though the film includes a fight, a burglary and a hit-and-run matricide, it is crowded with talk, not incident. And Linklater's long takes and random vignettes can grow monotonous. Still, the ultimate effect is spellbinding. These UFO spotters, conspiracy theorists, anarchists and assorted oddballs are all alienated from society. "Withdrawing in disgust," says one, "is not the same thing as apathy." What Linklater has captured is a generation of bristling minds unable to turn their thoughts into action. Linklater has the gift of a true satirist: He can make laughter catch in the throat.