At last, a movie for the generation that did inhale and made cool a two syllable word. Richard Linklater exploded on 1991 with his compelling poverty row compendium of the disposed Slacker, and inadvertently named a whole sub-culture. But despite the promises, the young director's career looked all set for UK video hell when his follow-up failed to rise above a Stateside cult audience. All praise then to the Feature Film Company for rescuing this second feature for the big screen.

It follows the lives of a large, mixed bunch of kids from the afternoon of the last day of term in summer 1976, up until dawn the following morning. It's a catalogue of humiliating (and painful) initiation rights, copious drugs and drink, cars, and especially (8-track) music. But what's best about Dazed & Confused is what isn't on screen - no one agonises about going to college, there are no consequences for over-indulging, and virginities aren't being lost. This isn't rites of passage - just a high school film about people who actually went to high school.

There is more shape than in Linklater's debut - that long string of one-shot pearls strung almost coincidentally together - but still nothing that passes for so much as plot. Indeed, initially the flow of characters, the gruesome bell-bottoms, the seriously greasy hair, threaten a (dazed and confused) melt-down. But somehow the writer/director tows it all into shape, the lack of conventional narrative actually becoming a genuine bonus as Linklater's camera free-falls between senior-dodging freshmen, the permanently stoned Slater (Rory Cochrane, looking for all the world like a proto-Slacker in the making), Jason London's Pink, a sportsman who doesn't want to sign the coach's pledge, and any number of other cool chicks and guys who are just there to cruise and hang out until the huge, if typically informal, open air party. Linklater's entire cast of unknowns is uniformly excellent.

What this comparatively lavish $6 million ode to 70s youth culture proves beyond a shadow of a doubt is Linklater's ability to handle character as well as he marshalled that free-wheeling debut's eccentricity. Although it's never all that certain how he got there, by the end you seriously do care who these people are and where they've been. (Where they're going is easy - to buy Aerosmith tickets). No one's learned anything, but who wrote the rulebook that said they should? As Pink says at the end, "If I ever start talking about these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself."

As befits an age waiting for punk, the music in here is quite extraordinary - if we can take Alice Cooper ('School's Out', almost inevitably), Black Sabbath ('Paranoid') and War, then the twin horrors that were Foghat and Ted Nugent have a lot to answer for. The point is surely made that the real music we listen to is never quite of the first vintage memory tells us.

And before anyone asks, this is most definitely not an American Graffiti for the Six Million Dollar Man generation. There's none of that film's tiresome, portentous nostalgia offered. Instead this gem is just one of the funniest, least self-conscious and most essential rock'n'roll growing-up movies the States has ever gifted us. Co-ol.