**1/2 Various Artists

SUBURBIA

(DGC)

Don't get your hopes up. Yes, director Richard Linklater can do wonderful justice to youth culture, but the film really belongs to screenwriter Eric Bogosian, a macho master of a very traditional kind of "modern theater" in which psychological revelation is all. If the movie captures the mannerisms of convenience store bohemians and neophyte rock stars, it's only to skewer more perfectly the fear and egotism beneath their poses. So instead of offering a generational portrait-in-music like the songs in Dazed and Confused or American Graffiti, the soundtrack is just a mishmash aural backdrop to this "deeper" process.

Still, delete the dumb songs and film-score filler and you're left with a solid 37-minute sampler of what you might call anti-suburban rock. There's a shimmery new tune by Superchunk and two acerbic ones by Sonic Youth, a great cover of X's "Unheard Music" by Elastica with Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, and fine previously released numbers by Girls Against Boys, Thurston Moore, Beck, the Flaming Lips, and oddball icon Gene Pitney, whose 1961 "Town Without Pity" closes the soundtrack with an anachronistic blast of tortured pop grandeur -- a semi-ironic ending that all anti-suburban mix-tape makers will recognize from their own bag of tricks.

-- Franklin Soults