Sure, Waking Life is in some ways Linklater’s metaphysical remake of Slacker, exploding the Gen-x barriers thrown up around that landmark work and bringing it closer to a transcendent plane that he’s trying trying trying to reach, especially in this era, but never quite grasping. That’s what appeals to a lot of us about Linklater’s work, that it’s never quite there. His curiosity has to be bound by the physical demands of cinema. But this, this weird film, shot-on-digital and animated by rotoscope on computers, comes closest. Those formats mean it never really “existed” in any physical space. Produced at the dawn of the 21st century, it’s the perfect summation of a moment in time when thought and curiosity might be enough to carry civilization, when restless unease was the result of an economic boom and not certain doom, when the popular cinema could still be a little wily,...