6 items
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.
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.