In 2012, Slacker was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

[6] The characters include a talkative taxi passenger (played by Linklater), a UFO buff who insists the U.S. has been on the moon since the 1950s, a JFK conspiracy theorist, an elderly anarchist who befriends a man trying to rob his house, a television set collector, and a hipster woman trying to sell a Madonna pap smear.

[15] The list functioned as an unofficial script or storyboard, and envisioned the film as "one long sequence", directing Daniel's photography to be "quiet but eloquent", muted, and with a documentary feel.

Linklater's intent was to allow the viewer to "be aware that they are watching a construct," believing that the form of the film would underline the alienation of the characters.

[17] He used his Shell gasoline credit card to supply cast and crew with snacks and drinks, also providing homemade peanut butter sandwiches.

Due to his 16mm Arriflex camera and experience, Daniel became the director of photography, and helped secure a dolly for the film's production borrowed from KLRU, a local TV station.

A number of other film society contributors and regulars were enlisted as crew, including Denise Montgomery as sound recordist, Deb Pastor as art director, and Meg Brennan as script supervisor.

Linklater also cast notable Austinites of the era, such as Louis Black, Abra Moore, and Teresa Taylor of the band Butthole Surfers.

[2] Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "Slacker is a movie with an appeal almost impossible to describe, although the method of the director, Richard Linklater, is as clear as day.

[24] In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Slacker is a 14-course meal composed entirely of desserts or, more accurately, a conventional film whose narrative has been thrown out and replaced by enough bits of local color to stock five years' worth of ordinary movies".

[25] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A−" rating, writing, "Slacker has a marvelously low-key observational cool ... the movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have almost too much freedom on their hands".

[27] Rolling Stone's Peter Travers wrote, "What Linklater has captured is a generation of bristling minds unable to turn their thoughts into action.

Slacker is the only one I know of that claims this city's version of life on the margins of the working world as its whole subject, and it is one of the first American movies ever to find a form so apropos to the themes of disconnectedness and cultural drift".

[23] Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, "Though set in the '90s, Slacker has a spirit that is pure '60s, and in this loping, loopy, sidewise, delightful comedy, Austin is Haight-Ashbury".

The website's critical consensus reads, "Slacker rests its shiftless thumb on the pulse of a generation with fresh filmmaking that captures the tenor of its time while establishing a benchmark for 1990s indie cinema.

"[37] In the early 1990s, Slacker was widely considered an accurate depiction of Generation X because the film's young adult characters are more interested in quasi-intellectual pastimes and socializing than career advancement.