Slacker **** (1991, Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine) – Classic Movie Review 859

Writer-producer-director Richard Linklater’s clever, warmly regarded 1991 no-budget ($23,000, apparently) cult comedy hit focuses on some weird and wacky characters during a day in the life of Austin, Texas. The springboard for Linklater’s sparkling career, Slacker has a Clerks-style reputation as one of the best ever indie movies.

It is basically a series of quirky monologues by great bores of the day, all of them social outcasts and misfits, mostly 20somethings. The characters typically come and go randomly in and out of each other’s lives.

Slacker starts off very promisingly with the director himself Linklater playing a young man who Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station but decides instead to take a cab from the bus station and promptly proceeds to bore the pants off his non-speaking taxi driver (Rudy Basquez).

The film then follows other lives in a seemingly random pattern, aiming for no particular goal or reaching any special conclusion, apparently, except the end of the movie.

Luckily, many of the monologues, and sometimes the conversations, are funny. It’s particularly amusing when a UFO buff insists that America has been on the Moon since the 1950s, a woman produces a glass slide that’s supposed to be Madonna’s pap smear and an old anarchist shares his philosophy of life with a robber.

Linklater proves excellent at writing and filming dialogue, as he was to show so strongly later in Before Sunset/Sunrise/Midnight. But the dialogue and situation repetition in the movie has the inevitable drawback of starting to drive the film into the ground a bit at around the half way point of a 97-minute movie. It does come alive again in the last five minutes during the fast-cut super-8 film scene.

While certainly ‘top candidate for the cult film of 1991’, it’s not quite the ‘ground-breaking masterpiece’ of the advertising. Nevertheless however, overall Linklater’s promising debut is still highly amusing, likeable, fresh and original, though, and a really good attempt.

The Orion studio picked it up for distribution and wisely changed the title to Slacker from The Nobody Boy. Linklater’s 1993 follow-up is Dazed and Confused.

Kevin Smith said it’s the movie that inspired him to become a film director and make Clerks (1994).

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