It's evening outside of the Circle A in Burnfield and the local wasters are beginning to show for another heavy night of cigarettes and alcohol. There's nominal thinker Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi) and his girlfriend, the excitable wannabe artist Sooze (Amie Carey). There's the buffoonish Buff (Steve Zahn) and cynical tattooed racist Tim (Nicky Katt). And there's the quiet, brittle Bee Bee (Dina Spybey), a recovering alcoholic who never goes anywhere without she has her ghetto-blaster soundtrack of US angst rock. (The film is powered by Girls Against Boys, Beck, Elastica, and an original score by Sonic Youth.)

In school they had a friend called Pony who now gets his band's video run on MTV. That, those left behind figure, equals fame. And this is the evening Pony (Jayce Bartok) plays Burnfield. He's also promised to stop by. And when he eventually shows, with glamorous publicist Erica (Parker Posey) in tow, festering resentment and ambition slowly begins to surface.

The first thing you notice is how old this lot are. This is no teen-angst fest. The characters of SubUrbia are out of school, in their early twenties; long enough for Tim's glorious military career to have collapsed. Sooze has plans for New York, but we have to wonder at how much of that is driven by enthusiasm more than actual talent. Jeff and Tim are best friends, almost flip-sides of the same coin. But where Tim has rationalised his failure as hatred for the world in general and Pakistani store owner Nazeer (Ajay Naidu) in particular, Jeff is burning up with unfocused rage: "I don't need a limousine to know who I am."

As such, the film, as adapted by Eric (Talk Radio) Bogosian from his own play, offers no pat solutions. Dawn brings things to a stinging, bleak climax for some, possible salvation for others. That Buff is almost the Forrest Gump of the group and yet seems to fall on his feet is hardly a political statement. If you're looking for one of those, then maybe it's their complicity in fucking up each other's lives.

If Linklater's film is about anything it's the undirected frustration of the suburbs and the easy magnetism of youthful disaffection. In Tim, the equivocal, not-quite-likeable Jeff sees himself; the fear that, even in escaping and travelling the world, he will still end up back on this corner. Nominally the star, Giovanni Ribisi is excellent, with other standouts in a fine cast being Bartok as the inoffensive minor rock star Jeff so wants to hate, and Katt's unbalanced, nihilistic Tim.

That this was originally written for the stage is never in doubt, but Linklater's considerable skill keeps it all from feeling too artificially opened-out. In tone and execution it's of a piece with Dazed and Confused, where, at the end, the characters literally drove off to nowhere. SubUrbia soon begins to look like where they were headed.