The Young and the Restive

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

"I don't understand why things can't go back to normal at the end of the half-hour, like The Brady Bunch," one of the kids remarks as a new mini- crisis takes its place beside the last one nobody quite solved. "Because," someone replies, "Mr. Brady died of AIDS."

The idea that a 1970s sitcom could seem like paradise lost to a bunch of recent college grads looking (and not looking) for entry-level jobs while trying to find entry-level understanding of adulthood is a measure of something. The downsizing of American possibilities, maybe. Or the murkiness of American reality as it's refracted in sound-bite TV and a trashy commercial culture.

It may be, of course, that Reality Bites reflects no more than the latest styles in anomie among the young and the restive. But that in itself is a useful service when a lot of movies cater to this crowd but few attempt to understand them unsentimentally. Even fewer are lucky enough to have the wondrous Winona Ryder for the central role.

She's Lelaina, by day a production assistant on a fatuous morning TV show, by inclination a documentary filmmaker, trying to use her pals' lives and thoughts to make a statement about their generation. She's an up-and-doing spirit in a down-and-out milieu.

Ryder, in turn, is lucky with both script and direction. The former is by Helen Childress, 23, who not only has a good ear for the sound of her contemporaries but also knows how to shape it into dialogue that is pointed and full of unforced observations. Director Ben Stiller keeps things crisp, no small matter in a movie that features a fair amount of aimless activity and just plain lying around. The latter takes place in the "maxipad" Lelaina shares with Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), who sometimes imagines her own funeral as a scene from Melrose Place ("chokers and halter tops"), Sammy (Steve Zahn), who is gently receding into the wallpaper, and Troy (Ethan Hawke), who is a philosopher-couch potato, fired from his job as a newsstand clerk for eating a Snickers bar without authorization.

Troy is just the kind of broody lout a young woman like Lelaina goes for, despite the fact that junior TV-exec Michael (played by Stiller) is wooing her. Their triangle provides what passes for narrative structure, and its resolution is perhaps just a little too Brady Bunch -- that is, too nice and neat. But that's a small price to pay for a movie in which Vickie, confronting a small, unexpected example of decency, finds it "screws up all my old ideas of good and evil." And in which a despondent Lelaina, seeking solace from an 800-number therapist, wails, "I can't evolve right now." The movie bobs along on this stream of funny offhandedness, never losing its balance. If it's 10 o'clock, and you want to know where your supposedly grownup children are, this is a good place to look for them.