It seems every generation has produced its own cohort of overeducated twentysomethings who are stranded between promise and reality, and routinely dismissed as lazy or slow growers. Ben Stiller’s 90s romcom Reality Bites captured that enduring state of uncertainty, creative ambition and emotional drift with a distinctly gen X feel, when the only real enemies seemed to be capitalism and inauthenticity.
On release in 1994, the film received mixed reviews. Stiller, a first-time director, was credited with capturing a 90s post-college drift, while Winona Ryder’s magnetic performance as Lelaina was widely praised. The criticism was reserved for its “banal love story”, with Variety accusing it of selling out to a Hollywood formula – ironically what the film’s characters rail against.
Now a cult classic, Reality Bites remains a defining entry to angsty, post-adolescent 90s cinema, from its plaid shirt and Levi’s aesthetics and pop-culture one-liners (“I’m bursting with fruit flavour”) to its killer soundtrack, including Lisa Loeb’s hit Stay (introduced to Stiller by Ethan Hawke).
The film follows Lelaina, a valedictorian turned talkshow intern who is making a documentary about her friends’ collective ennui. There is the fun-loving and cynical Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), who manages a Gap (hello 90s); Sammy (Steve Zahn), quietly navigating his sexuality; and Lelaina’s best friend, Troy (a smouldering Hawke), who is pretentious, insecure and spectacularly emotionally unavailable, yet still in love with her. Enter Michael (Stiller), a young, affable executive at an MTV-adjacent company, who offers Lelaina stability and, later on, reshapes her raw footage into something more “palatable”. This love triangle between Michael, Lelaina and Troy is an argument about selling out, and that tension is where the film is most alive.
Much of that vitality comes from the screenwriter, Helen Childress, who wrote the film when she was just 20, drawing directly from her own life and those around her. The world feels properly unfiltered, from the relentless indoor chain-smoking to conversations that shift between irony and confession. Hawke later observed: “What’s rare is that there was no grownup in charge.” It gave the film both its authenticity and its structural unevenness.
Several scenes cut through with real, poignant force. Sammy, sitting on his parents’ front lawn after coming out to them, admits: “It’s not because I’m scared of the big A. It’s because I can’t really start my life until I’m honest about who I am.” Vickie, awaiting medical results, says: “I’m maybe, probably, sitting here dying of Aids, and I’m totally alone.” Troy’s infamous line – “This is all we need – you, me and $5” – distils a romanticised precarity that feels oddly current again.
Troy is arguably the film’s most dated proposition. Cerebral yet gaslighty, he’s the kind of brooding romantic hero a generation of 90s and 00s films handed us as the template: he’s mean because he likes you. The film stops short of fully interrogating him but time has done it anyway. While the twentysomething condition is universal, generations since have managed some evolution on that front (I hope).
Stiller enlisted the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, long before his Oscar-winning work on Gravity, Birdman and The Revenant. Shot on 35mm, the film switches between soft naturalism and stylisation. A late-night petrol station sequence with the group, stoned and dancing to My Sharona, is enhanced when it cuts to a static wide exterior shot – the only visible movement is through the shop window. It’s an elegant scene that captures carefree youth.
Alongside Empire Records and Before Sunrise, Reality Bites paved the way for sharper, more diverse malaise-lit cinema – Worst Person in the World, Shiva Baby, Moonlight and Return to Seoul – but its relevance lies in its most stubborn question: what happens when you do everything right and it still doesn’t work out? A few of us would like an answer.
Reality Bites is available to rent on Apple and Prime Video in Australia, the UK and the US. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here
