On September 24, 1993, Dazed and Confused stumbled into American movie theaters. Directed by Richard Linklater, the indie Texan filmmaker who shot Slacker on the streets of Austin, and starring a bunch of actors you kind of recognized, Dazed and Confused was an odd little film. The story was as directionless as its characters, stoned and lurking here and there, unsure what to do with itself or where to find a home.

Well reviewed at the time but unable to grab the nation’s attention, the movie didn’t do much at the box office (it opened at 14 spots behind The Good Son, the Macaulay Culkin/Elijah Wood thriller we’d all like to forget, but would eventually rebound a little).

Twenty years later, Dazed and Confused has aged into the best hangout film ever made.

The film captures perfectly a quality of the high-school years that rarely appears on film: boredom. Whether jock or burnout or geek or hanger-on, Dazed and Confused gives them all the equal, stoic treatment. What Linklater reveals in his intimate lingering portrait of a group of misfit boys and girls, and what he’d spend the next 20 years exploring in one way or another, is that no one, not the most popular and sought after girls in school nor lowliest kids on the totem, have any idea where they belong

And no one belongs in high-school, not really. Everyone’s just trying to survive. High-school, Dazed and Confused understands better than any of its peer films, is not about belonging, but about surviving the repetitive dreariness. High-school is something to be suffered through, endured, by any means necessary. Play football, smoke pot, drive in circles, date and drink and fool around; stay awake all night doing nothing. Make your friends, hangout for a few years, and then, well, Aerosmith tickets for the summer, and back to school in the fall.

Even the quarterback admits, “If I ever start saying these were the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself.”

This is the thing that makes Dazed and Confused special. High-school is four years spent looking for something to do. The average kid, Mitch in Dazed and Confused, is forced to occupy the same space as the O’Bannions, insufferable assholes who must be suffered anyway, as well as the Woodersons who refuse to grow up and become constant fixtures in town. But Wooderson and O’Bannion come together perfectly in Linklater’s suburban Texas town, and represent the brilliant unblinking nature of Dazed and Confused.

Wooderson, the 20-ish creeping towny played famously by Matthew McConaughey, is the most recognizable character from Dazed and Confused, twenty years later. He just can’t escape those high-school girls. “I get older, they stay the same age,” he, repulsively, quips.

O’Bannion meanwhile is a brute, played to dickish perfection by a then little known Ben Affleck. Aggressively violent and filled with rage, O’Bannion enjoys the simple pleasures of assholery: getting drunk and pounding on freshman. ” He’s kind of a joke,” says one of his fellow seniors. “Not a bad guy to have on your side, blocking for ya, though.”

The presence of both Wooderson and O’Bannion is accepted in equal measure by everyone in town, but beyond that, each is little more than another guy looking to influence the outcome of another night. Neither are particularly admirable, nor are they particularly villainous. Linklater doesn’t hold them, or anyone else, in a nostalgic glow or disdain for the 70′s.

They’re just two young men with very little to do. Like everyone else in the film, their time is spent acting out the non-drama of their lives, and getting a little older.

Upon its release, Dazed and Confused was overwhelmingly praised by critics. It was an “anthem” of youth, the “ultimate party movie” made with “quirky counter-culture intelligence.”

Those descriptions remain accurate. But they don’t quite capture the full quality of Dazed and Confused that has revealed itself since 1993. Nothing really does. Perhaps the key is simply Linklater’s unromantic perspective. Made with unwavering detail to the year it occupies but stripped of all nostalgia and judgment, Linklater (who was 31 when he made it) had the distance to know what it means not only to be in high-school, but to grow up and leave it behind. He’s called Dazed and Confused an anti-John Hughes movie: just a bunch of kids on the last day of school, hanging around. Not that much story, not that much action, nothing really going on-that’s how I felt in those years.

I was in junior high when Dazed and Confused came out, and I watched the film over and over throughout junior-high, high-school. Hysterically funny, a great soundtrack, it had Parker Posey and Joey Lauren Adams and Milla Jovovich, all of whom I fell in love with. I thought it was all the things a high-school comedy should be. But there was just something about it that captured my devotion after high-school, to this day. Something that has made Dazed and Confused get better with age.

And I know I’m not alone.

Quentin Tarantino, for example, said earlier this year that Dazed and Confused is his favorite film of the 1990s. The AV Club ranked it the 4th best of that decade. Steven Marche, in Esquire, called it “the definitive film of Generation X.” There are many other such descriptions. But most of the accolades seem to offer little detailed praise beyond that feeling one feels when watching.

I may not be able to put my finger on it-it’s got to do with memory, longing, aging, regret combined with Linklater’s laser-focus on character-but I know that, anytime someone tries to cast Dazed and Confused off as just a stoner comedy from the 90′s, I always smile at the opportunity to spread the good news about a great, great movie.