Sometimes, young people earn the reviled reputation of being bored troublemakers who have nothing to do. You know the ones I'm talking about. They are the ones who stand outside convenience stores or drug stores with a cigarette or a bottle planted firmly in their hand. This isn't a pasttime for these people, it's a way of life. It is a way of counting off the hours between sleep and, once in a while, school. Their goals are far from lofty.
The characters in Richard Linklater's subUrbia even fit the stereotypical look. You have Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi), who paces and shifts about, wearing a blue sweatshirt and absent-mindedly gnawing on the pullstrings. There's the moody Tim (Boston Public's Nicky Katt), a former athlete who chokes back booze as if it's what got him kicked out of Air Force in the first place. Buff (Steve Zahn) is the ultimate slacker with wrong-sized jeans that keep falling down, who adores practical jokes, rude comments and getting drunk beyond recognition. The girls that put up with them are Bee-Bee (Dina Spybey) and Sooze (Amie Carey), although they at least give the impression they don't want to be slackers forever.
There isn't much of a conventional story. Old school friend Pony (Jayce Bartok) returns to the smalltown of Burnfield to visit the bunch. He has become a bit of a rock star and an overnight success, much to the admiration and/or jealousy of the others. His publicist is played by Parker Posey, who is great in every movie she appears in. Despite limited screentime, she seems to have the most depth here as a former suburbanite who has stumbled out of the smalltown rut. Eventually, Jeff is told a dark secret, but in his inebriated state he isn't sure what he can or should do. The ending plays like the deus ex machina truck came thunderin' through.
Of all of Eric Bogosian's plays to bring to the big screen, subUrbia is a poor choice. The play has a lot of good, self-contained moments that intermittently come to life in the film, but more often than not it simply doesn't succesfully translate to a feature. Perhaps it's Linklater's semi-charged energy that drags the momentum down, or maybe it's the difficult act of juggling so many quirky personalities that is the root of the problem. Either way, this is obviously a story that wants to say a little about everything (immigrants, drug use, fame, sex, social structures) but in the end, seems just as disillusioned and deteremined to fail as the characters it depicts.
