Does Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’ Live Up To The Hype?

Boyhood is not so much something you watch as something that happens to you. It feels much shorter than its nearly three-hour runtime; but it also feels like it lasts years – 12 years to be exact.

The film, which comes out tomorrow in Australian cinemas, tells the story of a boy from Texas who becomes a young man. Director Richard Linklater filmed the episodic narrative over 12 years, with the same cast returning to the project once a year for a few days or weeks at a time. In his feature debut, non-professional actor Ellar Coltrane portrays Mason Evans, Jr. from the age of six until his first year of college, and we literally watch him grow up, along with his sister (played by Linklater’s daughter Lorelei). They’re raised by their working-class single mum (Patricia Arquette); their dad (longtime Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke) is in and out of the picture.

Over the film’s winding story we become remarkably invested in their lives, as they start school, as they move to a different town, as they experience divorce, as people come and go and sometimes come back, as things end and other things begin. The physical changes they go through between episodes are as disconcerting and eerily familiar as seeing a niece or nephew from out of town who’s suddenly all grown up.

You might know what to expect from reading a synopsis or watching a trailer, but Boyhood also does things that are hard to describe. It’s spellbinding and trippy the way it plays with time, the way it pulls back the curtain on the machinery of it all. It sounds like a poster-blurb cliché, but it really is like watching life lived. Like the desert sunset that frames one of its most memorable moments, Boyhood is slow, steady, quiet, almost imperceptible in its movements, but ultimately overpowering and unforgettable. Let’s just say I cried a lot. Not just during key scenes; sometimes randomly, at the beauty of it all. You need to see this film.

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As with many Linklater films, there’s no plot to summarise, as such. It’s a film about people, and the passage of time – a common thread for Linklater, whose Before trilogy, also starring Hawke, is also about the magic and terror of years flowing by. Not much actually happens in Boyhood – but also, everything happens. It’s the small, uneventful moments that fill our days, punctuated by the occasional rite of passage or conflict or heartbreak, and little bursts of happiness. Mostly it’s made up of daily routines (classes, a job at a fast-food restaurant), awkward family gatherings. and lots of hanging out. Does that sound boring? It’s not. Reality TV proves over and over that audiences will eat up trivial details of ordinary lives. Boyhood lives where real people live – in small, shabby houses with unkempt yards, in SUVs, in malls and diners and suburban side streets and fluorescent-lit classrooms. And it’s all heightened by the time-capsule effect: Linklater cleverly loaded the film with time-specific details – eMacs, the Obama campaign, the hype over the release of the sixth Harry Potter book – dating the film in advance, anticipating nostalgia.

One of the keys to Boyhood is the way Coltrane’s real-life development obviously parallels his character’s. We watch Mason change from a youngster who’s a cypher, who could be any kid, into a person with a definite persona who also happens to be a classic Linklater character. He’s shy, laconic, philosophical, quietly brilliant, scruffy but charismatic, impatient with authority, a bit of a stoner, a bit flirty. The process of making the film and working with Linklater must have affected him – and that is really weird to think about, but amazing to watch. It doesn’t seem like he’s acting so much as just showing up and being himself, but some of that might be Linklater’s artfulness at work too.

Slacker, Linklater’s first feature, changed my life when it came out. I was a 20-year-old film student. It was the first time I’d seen people on a big screen who looked and talked like me. It felt like hanging out with real people – many of them crazy, but still. The meandering, patchwork storytelling device was so simple yet ingenious and gutsy. Yes! Why shouldn’t you just follow a hundred different characters around Austin all day long as they talked about bands and anarchy and the meaning of time? It felt like a cinematic version of the indie-rock explosion then taking place.

Twenty-three years later, here comes the veteran Linklater with his masterpiece. Boyhood has that same freshness, that same familiar, lifelike quality, that same Yes! factor – but on a grander scale, with more depth and emotion. The differences between Linklater then and now, and me then and now, is just one of many things this film forced me to ponder as I observed the march of years onscreen. At one point late on, as Mason and his girlfriend hang out in an Austin café, they listen in on a disturbed loner talking to himself. It’s a direct tribute to Slacker, one of the many little touches that add to the feeling of being caught in a time warp when you’re watching this film.

Boyhood has a lot in common with another recent masterpiece, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life – the rural Texas setting, the intimate story of an ordinary family as transcendent epic, the romance of those dreamlike moments playing in the backyard. Call either of them the Great American Film. Boyhood is more accessible, thanks to Linklater’s unassuming, lackadaisical style; more than most filmmakers, he’s comfortable moving between the worlds of mainstream and arthouse. Whereas his more restless experiments (such as Waking Life) are sometimes muddled, some of his strongest work has been in a more commercial format. The smoked-out high-school comedy Dazed and Confused may be his best film — until now anyway — and I’d say the exuberant School of Rock is up there too. Boyhood walks both of these paths. There’s pure joy in filmmaking here, totally unconstrained by commercial expectations; but the idea and structure are so simple and appealing you could explain it to a kid.

As with The Tree of Life, I had the uncanny feeling I was watching scenes from my own boyhood growing up in the States. At the same time the character of the dad took on all kinds of meaning for me – Hawke is almost exactly the same age as me in real life. His portrait of a musician who struggles with responsibility and settling down, who makes many compromises, who becomes middle-aged before our eyes, is hilarious and spooky and wrenching. But talking to others who loved the film, I realised there are multiple access points for different viewers. If you grew up in the ’90s or the ’00s, it’ll be one long nostalgia trip with all the cultural references and music and clothes. Though the central character is male, the story features an especially brave and lucid depiction of a woman’s life; Arquette’s steely performance anchors the whole thing. In many ways it’s a film about parenthood.

Linklater’s tendency towards stiff, talky dialogue marks stretches of the film, but it mostly works here. Like Jim Jarmusch — another American master who’s never really gotten good at polishing dialogue — when he’s on form, it feels like a stylistic choice and not a problem. The characters and the ups and downs of their existence become so engaging that it evens out the rough edges of the drama (and there are a few).

Boyhood is a film you want to keep talking about, but I don’t want to spoil any more of its little surprises — and at a certain point you can’t do it justice. The best thing it does is give you a three-hour framework to ponder the weight and meaning of your own life. As it draws towards its beautifully open-ended final moments, you feel an aching sense of sorrow, effervescent wonder, something that feels like meditative peace and even gratitude. Yes, movies can do this, you remember. You can’t accept it’s about to end – you’d be happy to sit and watch three more hours. You want to keep seeing this miracle unfold. You want these people to stay in your life.

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Boyhood comes out in Australian cinemas on Thursday September 4.

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Jim Poe is a writer, DJ, and editor based in Sydney. He serves as publications and content manager at the Sydney Film Festival, contributes to inthemix and The Guardian, and co-hosts The DHA Weekly on Bondi Beach Radio. He tweets from @fivegrand1