About Clerks
Dante was supposed to have the day off. Instead he is called in to cover the Quick Stop in Leonardo, New Jersey, where, across a single black-and-white shift, customers misbehave, his ex-girlfriend gets engaged on the local news, and a video store clerk next door enacts hockey on the roof. Kevin Smith financed the film on credit cards and accidentally launched a decade of dialogue-driven indies.
Released in 1994 and running a tight 1h 32m, Clerks sits firmly in the comedy tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in English.
Director: Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Clerks is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Kevin Smith currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Marilyn Ghigliotti — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch Clerks
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- New York, NY — listed at 3 independent cinemas.
- Brooklyn, NY — listed at 3 independent cinemas.
- San Francisco, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Sonoma, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Campbell, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Santa Cruz, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Orem, UT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Waterville, ME — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Caro, MI — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Marion, IA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Ambler, PA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Brattleboro, VT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Clerks is a clean fit for that model: a 1h 32m comedy work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Comedy genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.