After 30 years, 'Dazed and Confused' is still all right, all right, all right

Richard Linklater's one-crazy-night-in-1976 tale from 1993 has moved beyond its stoner cult film roots to a deserved place in the canon.

One day when my sons were little, I took them and their cousins over to my town's high school, and they threw the football around for a while. While they played, I didn't envision them one day starring for the football team once they reached high school age- instead, I imagined them with a group of friends, hanging out at midfield, in the middle of the night. Although hopefully not with a David Wooderson-like 25-year-old joining them. 

That's the scene at the end of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused when it arrived in September of 1993, 30 years ago this week. I was a sophomore in high school at the time and my first impressions of Dazed were that it had an all-time great soundtrack of classic rock hits and that it was a movie the stoners in my high school really, really loved. 

Those things remain true of it, of course. The film wasn't a big box office performer when it was first released, and its soundtrack was a bigger hit than the movie. But as time has gone on, Dazed and Confused has emerged first as a cult classic, and then a just plain classic classic.

For a while, what stood out about Dazed and Confused was that its young cast consisted of a long list of people — Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Renee Zellweger, Parker Posey, Anthony Rapp, Adam Goldberg — who went on to do prominent work later on. 

But as I've watched the movie again and again over the years –and I'd guess I watch it around once a year — it's truly magical how Dazed and Confused was assembled at a specific moment in time, and told the story about a different moment in time. 

The obvious template is George Lucas' 1973 American Graffiti, which came out almost exactly 20 years earlier. Both were about one day and night in the life of teenagers of a past era, based in part on the filmmaker's own experiences, both were set largely in cars, and both featured wall-to-wall, period-specific pop and rock songs. 

Another thing both things have in common is that they're much more about character and atmosphere than plot. The biggest difference between Linklater's movie and Lucas'? A lot more weed and alcohol in the former. And it's set on the last day of school, instead of the last day of summer. 

Set in May of 1976, the film concerns the adventures of a couple dozen characters at various stages of the popular pyramid at an Austin-area high school. There are hazing rituals in place for both the boys and the girls, while the majority of the characters are "cool" (meaning, in the film’s parlance, that they partake of weed), Slater (Rory Cochrane) appears to be the lone stereotypical stoner. 

Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) is the closest thing the film has to a protagonist, is a long-haired incoming freshman being tormented by bullies, led by Affleck's super-senior, who want to paddle him. In a very Linklater touch, he's also a baseball pitcher, and back when Mitch lookalike Tim Lincecum pitched for the San Francisco Giants, you better believe I made a lot of jokes. Like this one, while the Phillies were losing to the Giants in the National League Championship Series in 2010:

And McConaughey, making his film debut, plays the townie who still hangs around and ogles high school girls. Sure, he gets the movie's most famous line, but there's no doubt the film considers him creepy and pathetic, with other characters commenting that he should be in jail. 

And '90s indie queen Parker Posey plays one of the era's most terrifying high school girls: 

There's also a crew of nerds, played by Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, and Marisa Ribisi. 

The movie led to a great oral history from 2020, Melissa Maerz's “Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused,” which is one of the best books I've ever read about a specific movie. 

The book managed to secure the participation of just about everyone in the cast and also revealed some surprises: A lot of the actresses clashed with one another, Linklater hated that stoned-smiley face on the poster (it was the wrong part of the '70s for that), and there was a titanic battle over which corporate entity got to put out, and profit from, that legendary soundtrack album. 

When I spoke to Adam Goldberg earlier this year, he had trouble believing it had been 30 years since he appeared in the movie as Mike Newhouse, the nerd who punches a bully (played by his multi-time co-star Nicky Katt.) 

"It was like a very Proustian experience having that," Goldberg said of his participation in the Maerz book. "The conversations that we had really took me back, and things I had forgotten- at a certain point you have memories of memories of memories. That's the incredible thing about oral biographies, you have this sort of Rashomon portrait of this experience." He added, however, that he has trouble watching his performance.

"There's a few seminal experiences and they sort of sit inside of you, and they're very present, and they're right there," Goldberg said, describing his time on that film as "these really measly four weeks that I spent in Austin, and it was this entire lifetime." 

"It was this incredible workshop slash fraternity slash acting class, film class… it was as many things as it could possibly be, in a very concentrated package." 

Dazed and Confused was Richard Linklater's second film, following 1991's experimental Austin pastiche Slacker.

Is Dazed and Confused his best film? I would say it is, even as Before Sunset reached higher heights, and Boyhood was more ambitious. In 2016, Linklater made Everybody Wants Some!!, which he described to everyone who would listen as a "spiritual sequel" to Dazed. Set in the '80s with a remarkably similar vibe, it's a movie I absolutely love, and not only because it's the only movie about a baseball team that's set entirely in the offseason. 

Dazed and Confused is funny, well-acted, and full of fantastic character beats. They say movies that are period pieces age better than contemporary ones, and that’s especially the case here. The film is available to stream on both Peacock and Paramount+.