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"I'm not even supposed to be here today." Kevin Smith's 1994 black-and-white debut, shot at night in the New Jersey Quick Stop where he worked days, for $27,575 on maxed-out credit cards. Dante, Randal, roof hockey, and the first appearance of Jay and Silent Bob.
A numbed-out actor comes home to New Jersey for his mother's funeral, meets a girl who lies compulsively and feels everything, and slowly wakes up. Zach Braff wrote, directed, and starred in his 2004 indie debut while playing J.D. on Scrubs — and its Grammy-winning Shins-and-Coldplay soundtrack became the mixtape of the mid-2000s.
Elliot Page's whip-smart pregnant teenager, Diablo Cody's Oscar-winning screenplay, a hamburger phone, and a Moldy Peaches soundtrack: Juno was the indie monoculture moment of 2007. Made for about $7 million, it earned $232 million and four Oscar nominations — and for a solid year, everyone you knew talked a little more like Juno MacGuff.
The song that made banjos cool again: Mumford & Sons kicked down the door for the entire early-2010s folk boom with a kick-drum-and-banjo confessional featuring one memorable expletive planted right in the chorus hook.
A deadpan indie comedy about an awkward teenager in small-town Idaho navigating high school, family chaos, and his own social ineptitude. Released in 2004, the low-budget film became a quotable phenomenon with unforgettable moments — "Gosh!", "Vote for Pedro", tetherball showdowns — and spawned endless merchandise and T-shirt catchphrases.
The slow-burn follow-up that out-charted its more famous sibling in America: 'The Cave' is the sound of fingerpicked quiet building into a full kick-drum-and-banjo gallop — and it became the song of 2010-2011 coffee shops everywhere.
![Video thumbnail — The Postal Service - Such Great Heights [OFFICIAL VIDEO]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0wrsZog8qXg/maxresdefault.jpg)
Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello made an album by shipping burned CD-Rs between Seattle and Los Angeles, named the project after the method, and never made another. Give Up went platinum on Sub Pop, "Such Great Heights" opened Grey's Anatomy and sold UPS ads, and the real Postal Service sent a cease-and-desist.
The 2000s' designated sensitive everyman: J.D. on Scrubs for nine years, writer-director-star of Garden State, and the guy whose iPod playlist a million college kids quietly adopted as a personality. For one decade, Zach Braff's daydreaming, monologuing, indie-scored inner life was the inner life of the culture.