The origin of Linklater - and slackers? (spoilers, sort of)

Obviously it's semi-autobiographical, since Linklater went to college on a baseball scholarship. Deep into middle age his approach is a bit misty and rose-colored, but perhaps it would have been sharper and more cynical if he had made this movie as a young man.

But if the movie as it is now had been one of his first Linklater would not be famous because it's mostly just kind of there. The protagonist is nearly a cipher and storywise it's just kind of listless.

There's an interesting aspect to it: the jocks, who are just blandly average young men besides their skill at baseball, want to have fun and meet girls to have sex with. In the course of doing so, they end up at a disco, country bar, punk club, and party held by performing arts majors. They (barely) dress the part at each venue and partake in activities while staying somewhat outside it all. They don't commit; they're only a little affected by their experiences.

10 years later is the era of Linklater's Slacker. Like the ready-for-anything jocks, the movie moves from scene to scene, somewhat aloof, getting nuggets of zaniness from mellowed punks (Butthole Surfers member in a role) and ramblings of aging stoners (like Willoughby) and other countercultural types. The slacker, which soon became the archetype of Gen X, is the bored former punk without the rage and commitment & too jaded to believe very strongly in anything, combined with the culture-conscious theater kid.

Another decade and a half later the hipster evolved from the slacker but is more self-consciously curating bits and pieces of culture, with few unifying themes other than tweeness, which would have been recognizable to hipsters only as irony and not at all to punks. The wide-eyed Gen X slackers of Before Sunrise are more sincere than cynical, like David Foster Wallace prefiguring the hipster's twee sincerity.

Everybody Wants Some is a bland movie, but it has its place in Linklater's ouvre and in recording/reinterpreting the evolution of middle class youth and youthful subcultures.