SubUrbia

Director: Richard Linklater

1996 / 121min / 35mm

Often overlooked in surveys of Linklater’s career, SubUrbia, his first film not from an original screenplay, adapted by Eric Bogosian from his stage play of the same name, is a work of enormous empathy and gets-under-your-skin melancholy, taking place over the course of a single night in the environs of a Texas convenience store where five twentysomething friends’ (Giovanni Ribisi, Amie Carey, Steve Zahn, Nicky Katt, Dina Spybey) nightly routine of shooting the shit is interrupted by the appearance of up-and-coming rocker Jayce Bartok and pushy publicist Parker Posey. The darkest of its director’s “hang out” movies, faintly pulsing with the ambient dread that comes of living in a landscape of superstores and subdivisions.