One of the nine million rules at our very posh school was that unless you were going home for lunch, you were not allowed out of the school gates during the lunch break, presumably for fear of being eaten by wolves. Like most others I obeyed this rule, until one day I'd been absent in the morning, and on my way in popped into a local record shop. This was where those who dared to flout the rule hung out, and in my uniform, nobody would know I'd been off in the morning. Glancing through some of my favourite albums, I suddenly realised that Andy Komocki was standing next to me. He was the coolest person in our year, having arrived from another school and being twelve months older than the rest of us. Of all the things to discover, he liked the same albums. We got talking, and thus began a pivotal friendship that I look back on as my real introduction to life outside school. Andy would take a group of us out in his car at lunchtime and drive round, speeding past the girls' school a couple of miles away. He gave me the first alcohol I'd ever drunk apart from the family Xmas tipple. Basically he taught me what you don't get taught at school - how to get by. I drifted apart from some of my more academic friends, and they would occasionally register their disapproval at Andy's wayward influence. Which is why when I saw "Dazed And Confused", I thought 'this is about me'. If you saw it, you'd think it was about you as well, because it's a film that captures those seemingly trivial but ultimately defining moments that mark a new stage in our lives.

Released in 1993 with a rather overstated ad campaign focusing on the drugs angle, it was director Richard Linklater's follow-up to "Slacker", which had been a pivotal spoke in the 'Generation X' wheel. "Dazed And Confused" is set on 28th May 1976, the last day of school before the summer vacation, and follows a cross-section of juniors and seniors during the day. While there is a loose plot of sorts, the film has a natural unaffected air of semi-documentary, and the acting is low key and realistic. Much of the minutae of teenage lifestyle is wittily captured in snippets like the three girls bitching about their friends, trivial discussions on subjects like the dollar bill and "Gilligan's Island", and bizarre initiation rituals involving either getting whacked with wooden bats (boys) or having flour and ketchup poured over you (girls). Linklater's script takes care not to write from a 1990s perspective, and apart from one incident where a gun is pulled (and that's soon passed), there is no overdramatic intrusion into the lives of these characters. While the 1970s setting is brought out by way of an assortment of horrible flares, shirts, stack heels and haircuts, much of the attitude and conversation could relate to now - although there is no evidence of the sense of frustration that was fuelling the Punk movement in Britain at the time. One character does however say "If I ever start talking about these as the best days of my life, remind me to shoot myself", and one can only smile at the naive complex which we all have when we're sixteen, and will look trivial when compared with adult problems.

Linklater described the setting of the film thus: "The future's on the horizon so there's a little angst about that, but they know they have one more year to f-ck around, so that's what they're doing. More than anything, it's about being frustrated. The thing about small towns is how creative people are no longer able to be in their own space, and how they create a liveable system no matter how bad things are". A lot of the film is taken up by apparently random driving around, but Linklater calls this "a statement of freedom" for the characters.

The central character, Mitch Kramer, is the film's most subtle creation. As a Junior he's on the receiving end of a particularly bad beating, but then is befriended by the Seniors one by one, and slowly gains acceptance into their lifestyle. By the end he's smoking dope, drinking beer and throwing a bowling ball into a car window. Mitch's story is at once something to admire and to be slightly appalled by.

Richard Linklater began his career with the oddly-titled "It's Impossible To Learn To Plow By Reading Books", before making "Slacker", in which a mixture of characters wander around a town talking. After "Dazed And Confused" came "Before Sunrise", in which two people spend an evening looking around Vienna. What his films have in common is a love of communication and dialogue, and an almost hazy openness which refuses to buckle to the expected. If Tarantino was the Scorsese of the 1990s then Linklater was its Woody Allen, making masterpieces that seem to be about very little, but then at the end you suddenly grasp the message. Linklater may yet prove more versatile than the style-obsessed Tarantino, and certainly his films won't date as quickly.

It would have been very easy to make a film like "Dazed And Confused" packed with incident and topped off with the death of one of the characters, but for most of us life rarely reaches such extremes. Instead it's a perfect film about teenagers, about life and living it, and of course about me in that record shop.