Vegas, baby. Vegas.

I remember I was working in Tempe, Arizona while doing a weekly show at a theater downtown on Mill Street. You know Mill Street -- whether you've been there or not. It's that street you find in every college town lined with hip shops packed to the gills with college kids every Friday and Saturday night -- and this particular Saturday night was no exception. It was the mid-'90s and Mill Street had just been bought up by upscale shops that replaced the old hipster joints, and the commerce of it was starting to show. Everything was too slick, too refined. But this was Arizona. And there are only three things to do in Arizona. Drink, play golf or both. And I didn't like golf.

Now I don't know what had tipped me off, but at some point in the evening I noticed I was being followed. There was some girl who just happened to keep showing up wherever I was ... just moments after I would arrive. Leave a place and she would immediately follow arriving just behind me at the next improbable location blocks away. I was starting to get creeped out. I don't want to get all Sam Spade about it, but there it is.

So I made my way into a coffee shop and out the other side, ducked around a corner and across the street to the front of a movie theater selling tickets to God knows what. "One, please," I muttered cautiously. The clerk nodded. "Show's already started." I looked around nervously. I was in the clear. So it was in through the lobby, down into the second row where I slumped down in my seat and prayed not to be discovered. I had no idea what I was watching. It was some indie film with two unknown actors talking about girlfriends in a coffee shop. Why did it always have to be coffee shops? But I started laughing, and I didn't stop.

It's rare that you get to discover a gem such as Swingers -- and rarer still that you discover it in such an oddball, indirect fashion. But here I was watching a small, staggered release of what would become an indie classic at the end of the initial independent film explosion of the '90s.

While only the first act happens in Vegas, the allure of that city permeates the entire film. The Los Angeles of the rest of the movie proves to be a wild wayback machine, a time capsule to a very specific time and place that will rocket memories back in very weird ways. The opening montage of photos -- very hip and slick at the time -- proves the most telling as you can almost tell the exact month and year they were shot by what people were wearing. There's so much flannel in the background, along with the very last of the mullets, intermixed with swing and ska attire that punctuated the end of grunge before the resurgence of the bubblegum pop that would mark the turn of the century.

What makes Swingers so classic is that it is very much a film of its time. Because it is a film about posers. A film about guys who want to "live the life" without really knowing what that means nor having the means to truly live it. They openly mock those who aren't as hip while rubbing elbows with them at the same party. They think they're Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra -- but really they're just a bunch of wannabes riding the hipster trip from party to party until it's time to call it a night.

And what seems to be an even better joke is that most people didn't get it. The joke was almost too subtle. The film's hero (played by Iron Man director Jon Favreau) manages his way to triumph simply by being himself, just as his overconfident and always successful counterpart (Vince Vaughn) begins showing his cracks -- he's what we here in Texas call All Hat and No Cattle. And yet it was Vaughn's character Trent who inspired a whole generation of kids to run out to swing joints, idolize the Vegas lifestyle and refer, again and again, to just how money they were. And they didn't even know it. Apparently.

The film is scathing, a harsh dissection of the hipster lifestyle of the time with Favreau constantly calling into question just why they're adhering to such inane rules of cool. And it is only when he casts them off that he attains the Vegas cool he was trying so hard to achieve in the first place. He gets the girl (a young Heather Graham), gets his confidence back and ultimately realizes that he's been living the life all along. He was, in fact, money. And didn't even know it.

I recall the first time I had drinks with Vaughn, some seven years ago in the aptly named Speakeasy. While we were swapping stories and talking about what was going on with his career (he was on the road with Favreau's directorial debut Made) some college age preppie hipster leans over me, interrupting, to say "Vince. You. Are. So. Money." Vince smiled at him. "Thanks, man." I looked at Vaughn and asked "Do you get that a lot?" He looked surprised. "No, man. First time." Five minutes later, what I can only describe as a clone of the first guy practically breaks his neck trying to croon over people to yell "Vince, baby. You are so money and you don't even know it." Vince took a sip of his drink and winked at me. "First time."

It wasn't until that moment that I got just how funny the joke really was. These kids had become Trent. And they had no clue.

Vegas, baby. Vegas.

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