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In 1988, playwright and monologist Eric Bogosian and director Oliver Stone got together to take Bogosian’s off-broadway Talk Radio and bring it to the big screen. It turned out to be an incendiary fever dream, a disturbing and vertiginous descent into the dark underbelly of America brought to the surface through call-in lines and AM radio waves. The film didn’t make a whole lot of money, but it got a lot of attention and four stars from Ebert.

In 1996, Bogosian joined forces with Richard Linklater to do the same with subUrbia, Bogosian’s off-broadway satire about the misguided youth of America. Linklater must have been an obvious choice for the producers, as he had just made three slightly comic, curiously observational, now classic films about youth — Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunrise. Unlike Talk Radio, subUrbia barely made it into theaters. It’s not on Netflix.

Sometimes, a writer and a director just aren’t a good match, and subUrbia plays like oil and water. In his films, Linklater may occasionally cast a critical eye on a character or situation, but his films are ultimately very sympathetic to the slackerly, occasionally freaky folks who inhabit them. Bogosian, on the other hand, is out for slacker blood; you can envision him gnashing his teeth, shaking his fist, yelling out the window from his typewriter to get those damned kids off of his lawn.

This is manifest in the film, literally, as a group of young slackers hang out in the parking lot of the local “Circle A” convenience store. Ajay Naidu, playing the youngish Pakistani owner of the Circle A, regularly comes out to literally and unironically tell the group of slacker teens and twentysomethings subUrbia revolves around to get off of his lawn.

Those slacker teens are a goofy bunch of cliches. Giovanni Ribisi plays a young Paul Giamatti. Steve Zahn is the unholy child of Flea and Crispin Glover. Nicky Katt is the rebel without a clue. Amie Carey is the alternachick. Dina Spybey is the quiet blonde with a secret, a la Laura Palmer.

Linklater does what he can. From the moody night photography to the perfect alternative soundtrack of 1996, he captures what a long night in actual suburbia looks like and feels like. The problem is, he has no idea what to do with Bogosian’s stagy dialogue; short, staccato and direct, full of quasi-satirical statements like “I was born here. I’m an American. I’m owed something.” or “I shot my TV.” that never quite feel like the things those characters would say.

Bogosian hates these kids, and finds them facile and stupid. Linklater gets them, and seems to understand why suburbia generates that kind of unrest, even if the film never says it out loud. The twain never meets, and the film ends up feeling like the kind of disaster that would happen if, for example, Sofia Coppola directed Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons.