NO movie sums up the pothead, coffee-drinking, shaggy-haired, come-as-you-are, everybody’s-an-artist vibe of Austin, Texas better than Slacker, the breakthrough feature from writer/director Richard Linklater (who still lives and works in Austin). It’s a seminal independent film of its time, the Easy Rider of the 90s in a way. It’s entertaining and artsy. Simple and inscrutable. Funny and philosophizing. 
For one thing, there’s no plot. It’s a series of character vignettes. We hang out with one character for a few minutes and then someone else passes through and the movie follows that new character for a little while until someone else walks by, and so on. Some characters get five minutes, some get thirty seconds. It’s like a relay race. And everybody’s talk-talk-talkin’ their heads off. About the nature of reality. About JFK assassination conspiracies. About the principles of anarchy. About their crappy band. About Madonna’s pap smear. They have conversations, they deliver monologues to interested people, they deliver monologues to disinterested people, and when no one’s around, some of them carry tape recorders and talk to themselves… and then there’s the guy with a PA system mounted on top of his car and who drives around ranting to the neighborhood. University of Texas students, schizophrenics, and lackadaisical artist/musician-types mix together here until you can barely tell the difference (okay, the college students usually carry book bags).
Great movie. Think of it as playing around with the AM radio dial in a town where every station has something strange happening on it.
It was a little cult hit made with a mostly non-professional cast for $23,000. Richard Linklater got work making Hollywood movies afterward and he followed this up with another Austin classic, Dazed and Confused.