While watching  Richard Linklaters indie favorite Slacker, it takes a while to realize that not only is there no plot or story line, but there isn’t even a main character you’re supposed to be following. However, once the you’ve come to terms with this concept, it becomes very easy to settle in and enjoy the brief episodes featuring the musings of over a hundred characters, who make up Linklaters portrait of early 90’s bohemia in Austin, Texas.

The film takes its viewer all over the city as it introduces a cast of twenty something “slackers” who think too much and do too little. The very first of these characters, the young man trying to make sense of his dreams in the taxi cab, is Linklater himself. Some of the people the you encounter throughout the movie produce highly intelligent postulates about life and society, often unintentionally, such as the gem of wisdom from the guy describing the aging process: ” They get fat and make fun of themselves, isnt that what all old people do anyway”? Indeed! Others however, I would not deem “overeducated”, as the ensemble is described as a whole in the DVD summary.  Amongst the true thinkers in Austin, the bohemian scene is also filled with crack pot conspiracy theorists, androgynous hustlers trying to sell Madonna’s pap smear, and others who would be best described as insane rather than an intellectual slacker. I thought that was actually the most interesting angle of the film, the way that Linklater created an ecclectic combination of the sane and the mad, all the while inferring that they all actually pertain to the same social demographic of early 90’s radical thinking bohemia.  (more…)