Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) comes of age in the '90s in the film The Wackness. (JoJo Whilden/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

The Wackness, a wistful new coming-of-age film by Jonathan Levine, is set in New York in the summer of 1994, when the heat in the city is nearly as oppressive as then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s war on crime.When he’s not dealing pot out of a repurposed Popsicle cart, 17-year-old Luke (Josh Peck) sweats it out in his Upper East Side apartment, trying to ignore his parents’ bickering by playing Nintendo and daydreaming about his crush, Stephanie (Juno’s Olivia Thirlby).

The Wackness is no anomaly — the ‘90s are very much in vogue right now. Grrrl-rock pioneer Liz Phair recently re-released her influential 1993 album Exile in Guyville, complete with a bonus DVD of interviews with some of the dudes who defined indie rock(including producer Steve Albini and Urge Overkill’s Nash Kato). SoCal punks the Offspring, who broke out in 1994 with the snotty hit Come Out and Play, released their first album in four years last week. Meanwhile, reclusive rock savant Kevin Shields is taking his band My Bloody Valentine — which disappeared after releasing the seminal 1991 album Loveless — back on the road. The ‘90s bug has even bitten fluffy romantic comedies, including the recent Ryan Reynolds vehicle Definitely Maybe, which was set, apropos of nothing, in that era.

The cover of Liz Phair's 1993 album Exile in Guyville. (Sony BMG)

Retro revivalism is nothing new; pop culture is constantly borrowing from the past. In the ’70s, the fascination with the ’50s brought us Grease and Happy Days; a few years back, it seemed like every rock band with a penchant for tight synth riffs and tighter jeans mined the late ’70s and early ’80s for post-punk inspiration.

But this new phase feels different. Remember the ‘90s? Sure, because they’re barely behind us. It used to take several decades before the cultural pendulum swung back around again; but the cycle has grown shorter.

There are a number of causes. First off, we have access to historical ephemera now in way that didn’t exist previously. YouTube allows us to unearth everything from one-hit-wonder music videos to kitschy TV commercials in seconds. BitTorrents enable us to download everything from obscure art films to old-school slow jams. DVD box sets of era-defining TV series are readily available — you don’t even have to set foot outside your house.

As The Wackness shows, the adolescent quest for self-definition was a far more isolating experience in 1994 than it is today: back then, it required a kind of active agency that would likely paralyse the Facebook Generation. For Luke, the bearish protagonist of The Wackness, inspiration comes in the form of a cassette handed over by the thug (Method Man) who supplies him with weed. It’s Ready to Die, the groundbreaking debut from hardcore rapper The Notorious B.I.G., an album that changed the face of hip-hop (particularly on the east coast) forever. Raw and aggressive, Ready To Die disrupts Luke’s anomie.

The late rapper Notorious B.I.G. (Venus Bernardo-Prudhomme/Associated Press)

I know the feeling: in 1994, I was 14 and depressed. Like Luke and his peers, I smoked pot and drank crappy malt-based coolers as a distraction, but the only thing that ever really broke through my melancholic funk was music. I may not have had a streetwise dealer slipping me contraband mixtapes, but I had a bike and a library card. For an entire summer, I refused to take off my Walkman, which I loaded up with cassettes of indie rock (Exile in Guyville, Sebadoh’s Bakesale, Sloan’s Twice Removed) I’d dubbed from albums borrowed from a North Toronto library.

Levine, writer/director of The Wackness, agrees that the ‘90s renaissance is a generational thing. “On a large scale, it’s about making the transition from being a cultural consumer to being a cultural producer, which I guess happens to a generation at a certain time.” Those “producers” are the boys who grew up to be laid-back alternadads and the moms who discovered feminism through Riot Grrrl culture and are raising their daughters to be brazen and tough. In both cases, they cling to the touchstones of their youth to prove that not too long ago, they were at the vanguard of pop culture.

Indeed, 1994 was a watershed moment in pop culture. It was the year the slacker opus Reality Bites appeared on the big screen, and the year Friends began. It was the year the Spice Girls were born, the year weedy emo crew Weezer put out their multi-platinum debut (known as the “blue” album) and — most significantly — the year Kurt Cobain died. Along with the arrival of the Notorious B.I.G., East Coast rap was galvanized by Illmatic, the debut album from New York emcee Nas.

Says Levine, “We picked up hip-hop as the sound of rebellion like the generation before picked up punk, and the generation before that probably had rock ‘n’ roll. The artists may have had no idea that white kids in the suburbs or even the city were going to connect with their music, but the messages were still speaking to us. They were connected to the spirit of rebellion.”

Kurt Cobain. (Frank Micelotta)

The film is, in part, a mash note to not just a time period but a way of being. In some ways, the early ‘90s – that liminal phase before the world wide web exploded – was the last moment in which pop culture was truly communal. Movies weren’t yet available on iPods or through portals — you had to physically visit a theatre and share in a collective experience, or at the very least engage in face-to-face contact with the snarky clerk at your local video store. And in those pre-downloading days, consuming music was about going to a bricks-and-mortar record store, rifling through cassettes and catalogues, poring over liner notes and painstakingly dubbing albums onto blank tapes.

But as the film also shows, the early ‘90s was also a period of awkward fumbling. Living in a pre-mobile phone era when computers were still considered office equipment and mass internet was a mere glimmer on the distant horizon, the troubled New Yawk youth pace in front of payphones and ride their bikes past apartment stoops in the hopes of crossing paths with the objects of their affections.

The overriding ethos of the era, though, was one of apathy, aimlessness and confusion brought on by the late-‘80s recession and the low morale that resulted from over-qualified twenty-somethings stuck with low-paying “McJobs.” For all their impossibly spacious, well-appointed crash pads, the characters on Friends could barely decide how they wanted their coffee, let alone what they wanted to do with their lives. Gen X poster girl Winona Ryder, the heroine of Reality Bites, agonized over the fact that she “was really going to be somebody by the time I was 23” — and then floundered. And the iconically angsty Angela Chase (Claire Danes), from the cult series My So-Called Life (which began and ended that year) provided morose teens with countless poetic axioms about finding herself.

Just over a decade later, it’s hard not to look back on that pre-internet age — and its pop culture — as a period of existential gloom. But Levine’s picture finds hope in the era’s artistic creativity, particularly in the ascendance of hip-hop. To paraphrase a line from the film, maybe we’re finally able to see the dopeness of the ‘90s, instead of just the wackness.

The Wackness is in the theatres now.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.