Filmmaker Richard Linklater was born and raised in Texas, so
perhaps it makes sense to call him a maverick. A listing of his more than
twenty films reveals how widely he has roamed, artistically, and how eager he
is to try on new subjects and new styles. Early films like Slacker (1990)
and Dazed and Confused (1993) explore the aimlessness of Texas youth
culture. Two years later Linklater was in Paris, shooting Before Sunrise,
the first of three romantic meditations on love and time. (The others are
2004’s Before Sunset and 2013’s Before Midnight; all three films
feature Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.)
While directing amiable studio comedies like School of
Rock and Bad News Bears, Linklater was also writing and
shooting the remarkable Boyhood. Filmed at intervals between 2002 and
2013, Boyhood is the close-to-the-bone story of a young Texas boy who
grows from age 6 to 18, learning to cope with life in the face of his parents’
divorce. (Hawke plays young Mason’s father, and Patricia Arquette won an Oscar
for portraying his mother.) Continuing his interest in the passage of time,
Linklater is currently working on a cinematic version of Stephen Sondheim’s
stage musical, Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim’s play moves in reverse
chronological order, with characters starting out as middle-aged cynics and
moving backward to their college years, when they were young and idealistic.
Linklater’s idea was to start by filming youthful performers in the play’s
later scenes and keep at it intermittently until (approximately) 2040, when the
actors would match the age of their characters’ older selves.
All of this, of course, involves a lot of lag time, as
Linklater waits for his lead actors—Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie
Feldstein—to be affected by the passage of time. Meanwhile, though, Linklater
has found other ways to pump up his creative juices. Remarkably, he released
two major films in 2025, both of them very much interested in exploring what it
takes to be an artist.
Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, was clearly made for a
specialized audience, those cinéastes who are keen on the heady period
known as the French New Wave. The film (shot in black & white, almost
entirely en français) re-creates the dynamic period—circa 1960—when
bright young French film critics like François Truffaut and Agnès Varda
were making the move into becoming directors. The focus here is on the capricious
Jean-Luc Godard, shooting on the streets of Paris an eccentric gangster
thriller that seems to break every rule of standard filmmaking. It’s fun to
peek behind the scenes of À bout
de souffle (better known to most of us as Breathless),
a film that every serious film buff knows practically by heart. I was most
impressed with Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Zoe Deutsch impersonating
Jean Seberg, a refugee from Hollywood not at all sure what she thinks about
Godard’s guerrilla brand of filmmaking.
Last year Linklater also released Blue Moon, a
biographical drama set almost entirely in New York’s famous Sardi’s. That’s
where the great Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart has gone after ducking out on the
triumphant opening night of Oklahoma!, written by his former partner
Richard Rogers with newcomer Oscar Hammerstein II. A drunk and a self-hating
homosexual, Hart tries to soothe his bruised ego with liquor, flirtation with a
pretty co-ed, and delusions of future grandeur.
We know, though, that he’s very near the end of his road. Though Ethan
Hawke hardly shares Hart’s looks and tiny frame, his is a masterful and
fascinating performance as a man who talks (and talks) to silence the pain
within.
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