So Jeff, from a tent inside his parents’ garage, and Buff, the pizzabox-folding pothead, and Sooze, the spiky-haired riot girl, and Tim, the kid who tried to get out of his hometown by joining the Air Force and found himself more eager to get out of the military instead, have converged on the side of the convenience store. They sit on the pipes and concrete and eat pizza and shoot cans into a Dumpster with a hockey stick and attempt to make staggeringly brilliant conversation about how kids are starving for a piece of pizza.

“You should get upset,” Jeff (Giovanni Ribisi) says. “Everyone should get upset. When Hitler was greasing the Jews, people were saying, ‘Don’t get me upset. You’re bumming me out.’ My duty as a human being is to be pissed off. Jesus Christ, not that it makes a difference on the first f***ing place. Nothing ever changes, man. Fifty years from now we’re all gonna be dead and there’ll be new people standing here drinking beer, eating pizza, bitching and moaning about the price of Oreos, and they won’t even know we were ever here.”

Buff (Steve Zahn) then spots a group of girls driving by.

“Hey!” he hollers. “You like orgasms?”

Bee-Bee (Dina Waters) shows up, asking about Sooze — and if “Pony” is coming by. “Pony” is a kid from high school who’s hit it semi big with his band Dreamgirls. Tonight, his presence somewhere in the world will fuel the envy and regret that color the dreams, or lack thereof, of our main characters.

“I gotta know what it’s like to be on MTV,” deadpans Tim (Nicky Katt).

To kill the time, Sooze practices Burger Manifesto Part One, a buzzword-filled feme-nihilist clogging/rapping performance piece. The beer-chugging boys get drunk and the store owners try to throw them off the property. They leave and imagine what Pony’s life is like (Buff fantasizes that, in Pony’s shoes, he’d have steak, babes and sex at his disposal at all times and, in his dream of dreams, he could spend his morning snorting coke and “spend the rest of the morning trashed watching Gilligan.”)

Directed by Richard Linklater and adapted from writer Eric Bogosian’s play, “subUrbia” is just about the best display of what life as a young person was like in the mid-90s, when it was sinking in that, for a vast swath of car-stranded, middle-America youth, everyone’s parents had left the next generation little more than what one character calls a “mosh pit of consumerism.” Even if you’ve been there, part of you wants to tell the kids on the screen to quit whining and make something of themselves. But you know they won’t — nor will most people. Not everyone wants to be a star.

Some people’s dreams end with a job at a liquor store selling six packs and getting excited about the local football team. Others steal a video camera to tape clouds. Others dreams end at a few lines of cocaine and a few episodes of Star Trek.

“I could go to New York if I wanted,” Jeff says. “But what’s the point?” Even Pony, when he arrives with his manager (the magnificent Parker Posey, who has a crackling flirtation with Tim) is still, to a great extent, living the life of the mind he would be living in Burnfield. His airport-hotel-show routine is boring him too, and you can hear it in his lyrics: “To be a man invisible is a remarkable thing to be.”

Jeff adds, later on, “maybe there isn’t any right move.”

Being ungrateful can be some kind of a sin, it’s true. But is it any worse than the sins of the people who create the sprawling nothingness of places like Burnfield, with their overgrown drainage ditches, ugly gravel pits and soulless strip malls, the streets lined with advertisements for homes you’d never want to live in and businesses

you’d never want to shop in, all lit by the red of Walgreens signs and the white of convenience store tile? If that kind of stucco overpopulation is what’s passing for ambition these days, then the kids of “subUrbia” can’t really be described as squandering life. In their case, it’s a mercy killing.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.