The film’s plot follows the last week of 1959, counting down until Eddie’s marriage to Elise, an event hinging on Elise’s completion of a football quiz. Eddie’s reasons for getting married are relatively vague—“It’s the right time,” “We’ve been dating for five years,” etc.—and he wonders about what he’ll be missing, although, “I never really did that much before,” he admits. But Eddie, an innocent, is not so much looking for a wife as for a replacement for his mother. Eddie still lives at home, sleeps late, fails to pick up after himself, and balks at demonstrating any autonomy, willing to be chased around the kitchen with a knife if it will get him a fried baloney sandwich. In short, he is a modern teenager with little ambition and few driving plans for the future. His obsession with the Colts provides at least some kind of stabilizing anchor, filling the void in his life his family’s Judaism obviously does not, since it is Elise’s passing or failing score on his test that Eddie uses to decide his future, rather than guidance from Above.

When Eddie does seek advice from his married friend Shrevie, Shrevie turns out to be similarly clueless in matters of long-term commitment, making it abundantly clear that his driving motivation to tie the knot with Beth was the prospect of guilt-free sex. The trouble is, now that he has that, he doesn’t know what else is keeping him in the relationship. The best he can do is to parrot socially acceptable lines that “marriage is great” and “Beth is great” with nothing to support them. Lost in the complacent, adult world of his parents and disconnected from his youthful, bachelor friends, Shrevie buries himself in his record collection, the one area of his life that he is in complete control of and in which he can be knowledgeable. The quiet, unfocused disarray of his existence disappears in the carefully alphabetized, meticulously categorized and memorized shelves of R&B, rock ‘n roll and jazz music and provides him with a point of reference with which to try and make sense of his life. Subsequently, when Beth intrudes on his system, he reacts with all of the angry frustration that has been building during his thus-far aimless adult life.

In a stark departure from the rather complacent irresponsibility of Eddie and Shrevie, there is Fenwick, who stands at odds with his white collar, collegiate family and behaves in ways that make the other guys look like the mature adults they are not. This is most evident when, in one of many drunken moments, he strips to his boxers and sprawls out in the manger after noticing someone had taken the Jesus figurine. Having rejected the ways of his father and older brother by refusing to join the family business and dropping out of college, Fenwick is determined to be his own “savior,” forge his own path and rely on no one else to make it happen, although he’s still dependent on a monthly allowance from his family. For the most part, he does whatever he feels like doing, be it smashing windows, faking a car crash or go drinking at all hours of the day or night. But Fenwick has no clear plan for his life anymore than Eddie and Shrevie do, acting out in reckless abandon only because everyone else is getting married or going to college and otherwise toeing the line of adult responsibility. In many ways, Fenwick is the forerunner to the type of rebellious teenager that would worry parents in the coming age of Beetlemania.

Boogie, on the other hand, is more an homage to the Greaser generation that is on the way out in 1959. He has the cool attitude, smooth charm, sly nickname and gelled hair that have all started to falter and grow tired. Far from living on his parents’ charity, Boogie works in a hair salon and tells girls he goes to law school at night, though in reality he spends most evenings arranging expensive bets with acquaintances of his father, hoping to score big. Gambling is to Boogie what the Colts are to Eddie, and everything has a price, whether it’s the next ball game or odds on Elise actually passing Eddie’s test. Boogie, like Fenwick, is moved by the moment, giving little thought to consequences (like what he would do if he happened to lose a two thousand dollar bet with only fifty dollars in the bank), but usually manages to avoid disasters with quick thinking and smooth talking. But these traits will not serve him in the real world beyond the diner and when he finds himself seriously in debt, he can’t come up with any better solution than to continue betting on his foolish behavior, making it clear that unless he changes himself to meet the realities of adulthood, he will not get very far.

Perhaps the most “grown up” of the Diner crew is Billy. He seems to have an ambitious goal set in motion and the faculties needed to see it through. When he gets off that train and meets up with the rest of the gang a few days before the wedding, his self-possessed attitude place him head and shoulders above the drifting youth around him. He refuses to take part in any of Boogie’s gambling schemes and proudly announces his plans to go for a master’s degree. Of the six, Billy is arguably the only adult among them. But back in the environment of the small town diner and surrounded by his buddies, Billy is revealed as the rash, emotionally naïve person that he truly is. While settling a score from high school seems insignificant to Shrevie’s wife, Beth, the other guys fall behind Billy enthusiastically when he unexpectedly cold-cocks a guy he recognized from a high school baseball game gone bad. Billy also has some emotional maturing to do, as well, since he, in the words of his former girlfriend, “is confusing friendship with a girl with love.”

Billy is the only one of the gang who demonstrates any real respect for the women in their life, the only one who considers the possibility of his girl trying to maintain a career after having their child. He gets no helpful advice from his friends who air typical male attitudes of the WWII era: marry the girl, get your degree, live happily ever after and don’t complicate matters by giving the girl a say in the plans! Billy, however, doesn’t want to marry her simply to cover for his indiscretion or because it is the acceptable thing to do—he wants to marry for love and have the kind of mutually respectful relationship he doesn’t see in his parents or his friends’ parents. When he sits in Eddie’s kitchen and watches how his friend manages to cajole his mother into serving him hand and foot, the distaste is evident on his face. Billy is a progressive, modern man trapped in a society that is a few decades behind him and relentlessly pounding him into the same mould as Eddie and Shrevie.

Amid this ocean of uncertainty and turbulence, there is Modell. His complete absence of assertiveness (even in situations as minor as asking for a sandwich or a ride home) is a source of agitation for Eddie, who repeatedly demands that he just say what he wants, rather than beat around the bush with sly questions. That Eddie should take issue with this characteristic when he, himself suffers from the same basic problem adds a layer of irony to Modell’s otherwise undeveloped character. While Modell drops hints and waffles back and forth on seemingly unimportant issues, Eddie is doing the same thing in his life, struggling to take any definite course of action, allowing his friends’ inferences and suggestions to shape his behavior and responding to all of it with a mystified aloofness. Perhaps Eddie’s frustration with Modell’s indecisiveness is born merely out of recognition of his own failings as an adult.

Diner ends with Eddie’s marriage to Elise, giving the appearance of a resolution when, in fact, there isn’t one. Eddie vacillates on his decision to tie the knot, but ultimately goes through with it, just as his friends expected him to. He has, after all, had no other girlfriends and the wedding plans have been organized for quite some time. One can predict that the pair will go on to many years of quiet dysfunction, with Elise picking up Eddie’s misplaced socks and underwear and having dinner on the table promptly every evening for him. Shrevie and Beth conquer the latest hurdle in their relationship, as they have every other conflict that has come between them in their marriage, but Shrevie will still linger over his records and Beth will still be left wondering how he really feels about her, sticking it out for the next twenty or thirty years out of loyalty to Boogie, who continually shows her greater respect than her husband ever has.

As for Boogie, he brings a date to Eddie’s wedding, a horseback riding woman who refuses to refer to him by his silly greaser nickname. Bailed out of his financial crisis by one of his father’s generation, he quickly demonstrates that he has learned nothing from the experience by sucker punching the man he owed. Though he may kick his moniker to the curb, chances are that in a few days or weeks he will once again be gambling, working only to pay off his inevitable debts. Fenwick plans to travel Europe for a while, because crossing the United States has been done before. How he will bankroll this effort on only the monthly allowance he disdains remains conveniently overlooked, proving he will travel no farther than where his “College Bowl” education extends. Billy brings the mother of his child and they share a somber dance, having reconciled nothing about their relationship and gained nothing from their heated discussions aside from the knowledge that neither is willing to move from their positions on marriage and feminism, concepts still too foreign for either to fully understand. And Modell gives a cheerful toast, forever the symbol of the times in which he and his friends are now living—confused, undecided, but undaunted about facing the future.

These are personalities and attitudes known very well to modern audiences—the aimlessness of life amid a sea of glitz and artificiality, the search for importance and personal direction in a society where traditional mores seek to send everyone down the same path, and the struggle to integrate new ideas into the old system without destroying it. The fine art of introspection is rapidly being lost to Americans, and along the way, personal responsibility is forfeited and those that possess the self-awareness to question this strange way of life are increasingly met with disinterest and very few answers. So the search continues, ending where it began with no conclusion at all, leaving even fewer in the succeeding generations willing to take up the quest. As the film’s end credits roll, we hear the six young men in the diner once more in the midst of a desultory conversation, driving home the fundamental truth that the more things change, the more they ultimately stay the same.