SubUrbia

It takes place in one night. An invented town in Texas, the parking lot of a convenience store, and a handful of people in their twenties who hang around there. None of them is going anywhere. Then Pony, an old friend, turns up: he has become a musician and arrives in a limousine with a publicist. Everything the group has kept quiet about their own lives starts getting said. Richard Linklater directs, from Eric Bogosian's play, adapted by Bogosian himself. Giovanni Ribisi, Steve Zahn, Amie Carey, Nicky Katt, Parker Posey and Jayce Bartok are in the cast. It should not be confused with Penelope Spheeris's Suburbia from 1983. They are entirely different films. What separates it from Linklater's earlier work is the hardness. Slacker and Dazed and Confused looked on with a loose, forgiving sympathy. Here there is a merciless distance from the same kind of young people. Talk is still the centre, but this time talk is shown as a defence mechanism. The store is run by a Pakistani American family, and the way the group treats them is the film's most uncomfortable and most honest material. The soundtrack includes Sonic Youth, Elastica and Gene Pitney. Who it is for: viewers who want Linklater's dark end, play adaptations, and portraits of nineties youth. Who it is not for: most of these characters are unlikeable by design and the film will not manufacture sympathy for them, and if you want it to arrive somewhere, the ending will not satisfy.