There are a lot of potential films to consider when you’re looking for the ultimate representation of 1990s American youth culture. There are a lot of respectable choices: Cameron Crowe’s Singles (1992), Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994), Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) all seem to me to be reasonable contenders. For my money, however, it is Allan Moyle’s 1995 comedy Empire Records – and this is my attempt to explain why.

Local independent music store Empire Records is on the verge of bankruptcy. While owner Joe (Anthony LaPaglia) negotiates to sell the business to national franchise Music Town, enterprising employee Lucas (Rory Cochrane) steals an entire day’s takings, flees to Atlantic City, and bets it all to help Joe buy his way out of trouble. Lucas loses.

That’s the set-up of Empire Records. The rest is an ensemble comedy in which a group of young record store employees (Liv Tyler, Renee Zellweger, Robin Tunney, Ethan Embry, Johnny Whitworth) serve customers, share jokes, argue about music, capture a shop lifter, and play host to 1980s pop idol Rex Manning (Maxwell Caulfield). All the while the shadow of the Music Town takeover looms over all.

The film is a story of independent spirits battling a soulless corporation, produced without any apparent self-awareness by Regency Enterprises for Warner Bros; a soulless corporation. It is not a celebration of or argument for 1990s youth culture: it is the very profit-motivated, middle-of-the-road, lowest-common-denominator that movement rejects, now co-opting surface-level aesthetics to sell a culture back to itself. It lacks the artistry of Crowe and Linklater, nor the smart commentary of Reality Bites. Instead it represents a well-massaged, cynically assembled product. Its soundtrack is purposefully produced to appeal to multiple market segments. Its characters are rough photocopies to attract broad demographics: the mod, the rocker, the party girl, the goth, and so on.

There is a deep and oily insincerity to the piece – one that is rather surprising given that Allan Moyle’s other best-known film is the rather more effective Pump Up the Volume (1990). It seems, however, that the cynicism that drives Empire Records‘ artificial pretence of culture is precisely what makes it feel so definitively a product of its age.

Just as the American music industry adopted, exploited and copied the nascent grunge genre into big business, so Empire Records co-opts the content and aesthetic of earlier youth comedies and dramas to make a profit. Reality Bites made a critical plot point of an insincere executive distorting a young artist’s work into a bland commercial exercise. Here we are essentially seeing it for real.

But here is the thing: it is still an enormous amount of fun. Moyle has aced the casting with not only a couple of long-time underrated talents but more than a few young performers on the cusp of stardom. Anthony LaPaglia does a rock-solid job of anchoring the production, and he does so with charisma and strength. As for the younger performers, each does get their own series of scenes and moments to shine, and each does an enjoyable job. There really is not a weak link among them.

Under no definition of quality is Empire Records the best youth film of the 1990s, nor is it the most influential: in both cases that is almost certainly Dazed and Confused. Empire Records is too by-the-numbers, too mediocre, and too synthesised. In that respect, however, that makes it exactly the average level of quality for its decade. In a real sense it is the most emblematic of its time and the place: the ultimate 1990s experience, both the exciting and the dull, the spontaneous and the manufactured, the upbeat and the cynical. I unapologetically love it.