A Toke of Our Esteem

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: DAZED AND CONFUSED

WRITER AND DIRECTOR: RICHARD LINKLATER

THE BOTTOM LINE: Where were you on May 28, 1976? If you're about 30, this cogent comedy remembers you.

Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London) is the nearest thing Lee High School -- or this engagingly vaporous movie -- has to a hero. He's a decent guy, a star quarterback, a rebel with a cause. He is also his idea of a realist. Scanning a party-hearty nightscape of dopers, predatory jocks, ineffectual intellectuals and girls auditioning to be meat, Pink sighs, "If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself."

Pink has a point, for the locals (the film was shot in Austin, Texas) are an eccentric bunch. In a town-honored tradition, the new seniors submit the new freshmen to hazing: the younger girls get pacifiers in their mouth, the younger boys paddles on their butt. Then, as a reward, they "take you out and get you drunk." What a dear ritual this is, mixing mandatory hedonism with the cracker camaraderie rampant in certain football-worshipping, cousin- marrying sectors of the American heartland. Paris, France, comes to Parris Island.

Well, that was 1976, this is 1993, and somewhere Pink is being reminded of his words and handed a Ginsu knife. Who could not be nostalgic for those heady days when a gallon of gas or a pack of cigarettes cost 60 cents, when songs still had chord changes, when Gerald Ford was a nation's jovial punch line of a President? The '70s was the last pre-rehab decade: you could do cool stuff and not worry about dying from it. So despite Richard Linklater's attempts to be sharp-eyed about the period, Dazed and Confused is doomed to look as romantic as an old prom portrait.

Linklater's problem here -- as in his 1991 Slacker, a goofy La Ronde of layabouts and conspiracy theorists -- is that he is incapable of drawing characters who are only caricatures. They always wriggle smartly to life, from the narcolunatic (Rory Cochrane) convinced that George Washington "toked weed" to the brainiac (Adam Goldberg) who decides he doesn't want to be an A.C.L.U. lawyer after all because he can't stand the people he would be defending. O.K., but what's the alternative? "I wanna dance!"

The movie's advertising was modified after industry censors objected that it promoted drug use. Linklater is surely no ham-fisted moralist, and his film has lots of attitude to shake a finger at. But it also has enough buoyant '70s music to shake anybody's tail feather, and a kind of easy jubilance of narrative and character. Bet it makes you wanna dance.