"Slacker" begins with a young man asleep on a bus as it pulls into a terminal in Austin, Texas. He wakes up, hails a cab and then just starts talking to the stone-faced cabbie in a stream-of-consciousness monologue about dreams and alternate realities.
Once in town, he gets out of the cab and begins walking down the street. Suddenly, a hit-and-run driver rounds the corner in a station wagon, leaving a woman on the ground, her grocery bags spilling all over the street. The man from the cab picks up her purse and walks away. A jogger stops to look at the woman in the street, then a driver stops for a moment . . . all the while, the camera slowly pulls back. Then, as the camera continues in one fluid take, our view settles on the station wagon that hit the woman as it pulls up in front of a house and the driver, later revealed to be the victim's son, calmly goes indoors.
After we've spent some time with him, he is taken from the house by police, and as he passes a couple of students on the street, the camera begins following them. They go to a coffee shop and meet someone else — and as he leaves, the camera goes with him.
And so it goes, from one character to another in roughly a 24-hour period, strangers who have briefly connected, all with only one thing in common: They are slackers, defined by director-writer-producer Richard Linklater (who also appears as the first character, the man in the cab) as someone who avoids responsibility, part of a new generation of young people rejecting the values of the previous generation.
Linklater has gathered an enormous number of these characters, most played by non-professional actors, for a comedy-drama that is every bit as ambling in the telling as the lackadaisical lives of those who populate the film, without a single character repeated. There is no story here, as the film simply moves from person to person, a sort of walking version of "My Dinner With Andre."
For the first half-hour or so, this is funny and fascinating stuff, giving a new twist to the voyeurism of filmwatching, forcing the audience to limit expectations as we simply spy on a few moments in the lives of these eccentrics. Especially funny are Teresa Taylor, who tries to sell what she claims is a genuine Pap smear from Madonna; Jerry Deloney, who has conspiracy theories galore, involving everyone from the CIA to NASA to kidnapping aliens; and R. Malice, who philosophizes most earnestly about Scooby Doo . . . yes Scooby Doo, the TV cartoon dog.
But as the freshness wears off and the anticipation of characters becomes somewhat predictable, the film begins to wear out its welcome.
There are some interesting people here, but they seem outnumbered by those that are extremely dull. And since each gets only five minutes or less on camera, you have to wade through an awful lot of dull to get to the interesting.
Still, Linklater is an imaginative filmmaker (though it should be said that his device owes something to Luis Bunuel's "The Phantom of Liberty"), and it's easy to see why this little independent production was talked up at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
"Slacker" is rated R for profanity, vulgarity and mild violence.