Jeremy Brock claims that Driving Lessons, his debut directorial effort, was inspired by his youthful experience in the employ of Dame Peggy Ashcroft, one of the great ladies of the British theatre. (Of her infrequent forays into the world of cinema, she is probably best remembered as the abused country wife who shelters Roger Hannay, the fugitive hero of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, and, almost a half-century later, as Mrs. Moore in David Lean’s 1984 adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.)

Although he has solid credentials in Hollywood as the director of movies like The School of Rock and The Bad News Bears, Richard Linklater at heart remains an independent filmmaker. He set a template for his career with his first feature, Slacker, a free-form quasi-documentary which spends a day floating around the denizens of his home town of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on conversations rich in ideas, questions and occasional lunacies. That none of these are fully developed, let alone resolved, only added to the charm of the piece.