Richard Linklater

Few studios have ever released a film like Richard Linklater's "Waking Life," but then there's never been another film quite like this adventurous yet problematic undertaking. The Austin, Texas, filmmaker who came to renown with "Slacker," "Dazed and Confused" and "Before Sunrise" has experimented with a new animation technique, which involved shooting and editing the film as a live-action work and then having a team of more than 30 graphic artists "paint" each frame via computer.

When he was a boy in Texas, Richard Linklater thought he might grow up one day to live in a cartoon. "The cartoons you watched, it just seemed like they were all having so much fun," says the director of "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused." "Seriously, I think I was in the first grade before it was made clear to me that I would be a human my whole life and that I couldn't be the Pink Panther or Bugs Bunny. I wanted that range of opportunity they had."

Since bursting into the film scene in the 1990s, Richard Linklater has become one of America's most singular directors. The 37-year-old Texas native received acclaim for his experimental low-budget 1991 feature "Slacker," which followed the lives of 100 characters over a 24-hour period.

Ol' Willis would most likely think it fitting. "The Newton Boys," Richard Linklater's filmed adaptation of the life and times of Willis Newton and his three brothers, the most successful larcenists in American history, had been plagued all spring by record rains, punishing hail, hip-deep mud and even a tornado that took 27 lives just a few miles from the film's set in Bartlett, Texas.

May it please the court: Matthew McConaughey will speak for the defense. The 26-year-old Texas native, discovered by filmmaker Richard Linklater in 1993's nostalgia trip "Dazed and Confused," has steadily worked his way toward leading-man status. Last year saw him as a by-the-book cop named Abe Lincoln in "Boys on the Side" and, somewhat less memorably, as a homicidal tow-truck driver in "The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Now he's poised for stardom with "A Time to Kill," the latest John Grisham legal thriller that just wrapped in Mississippi.

The high school "experience" ought to be a cinch to capture on film but it rarely is. Those dawdly, dithery days and nights too often come across as coy, mannered--worse, meaningful . Most high school movies are made by adult filmmakers who don't remember that, when you're young, you don't comprehend your life as a series of coming-of-age revelations. You're too busy being dazed and confused.

"Slacker" (at the Nuart) is a film that celebrates tedium. If you think that sounds just a teensy bit boring, you don't know the half of it. Welcome to Austin, Tex., which, if this shaggy-dog tale is any indication, is clearly the ennui capital of the known world, filled with self-centered, undirected, overly verbal people who can barely be bothered to get out of bed. Anyone who's ever spent any time in a university town knows folks like this.

Losers and schmoozers, philosophers, poets, assorted conspiracy buffs and lunatics by the score--not the stuff of your typical Hollywood blockbuster, or even an interesting L.A. cocktail party. But as drawn and manipulated by first-time filmmaker Richard Linklater, the ravings and conversations of a collection of societal drop-outs--"slackers"--who slink through the alleys and coffee houses of Austin, Tex., might just be the stuff that Hollywood dreams are made of.