Ruben Rosario

The Texas sky is vast, expansive and full of promise. Then again, most things feel new, infused with endless possibilities, when we’re six years old. Even for Mason, who’s living with his mother Olivia and older sister Samantha in a modest house that’s not much to look at. He misses his dad, who’s thousands of miles away in Alaska working, but it’s not like he was still living at home, anyway. And like many boys his age, life unfurls in a mundane procession of family dinners, playtime, school work, playtime, sibling bickering and, oh yes, more playtime. And then there are those quiet in-between moments, when he lays on the grass and looks up.

We’ve all seen the scenario playing out at the beginning of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood in many cinematic incarnations: Moppet struggles to get by in a broken home amid his immediate family’s own trials and tribulations. The difference here is that, as the years go by, you witness the lead actor actually growing up alongside the character he is playing. It must have sounded like a quixotic proposition: Well-regarded director with indie cred but with a healthy studio production résumé intends to shoot a coming-of-age drama over a 12-year period, on and off, using the same cast. Call it moxie, chutzpah or gall, but the School of Rock helmer has pulled off this daunting challenge with sensitivity and skill.

The magnitude of Linklater’s achievement, however, is not initially apparent. Early on in the film, we’re seeing most events from Mason’s grade-school perspective. And then, without warning, the movie begins to jump ahead a year, and there’s Mason, played by newcomer Ellar Coltrane, looking slightly older. The slow-motion time-lapse effect keeps Boyhood chugging along at a steady clip. Olivia (Patricia Arquette) decides to move to Houston, where she starts going to college and winds up marrying one of her professors. Linklater handles the problems Olivia and the children face in her ensuing years with naturalistic verve, navigating his committed cast through familiar subject matter in a way that feels honest and raw.

And popping in here and there to check in on the kids is Mason, Sr. (Linklater regular Ethan Hawke), a ne’er-do-well man-child who always seems to be scraping by the skin of his teeth. He’s the most likable deadbeat dad I’ve seen at the movies in a long time. It’s clear he cares for Mason and Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter), but there’s a streak of my-needs-come-first slackerdom that keeps the character grounded in reality. On the page, Mason, Sr. seems to share more than a bit of the same DNA as Jesse, the author we’ve seen mature and evolve in Linklater’s Before trilogy, but on screen, he comes across as a completely different person. Like his son, Mason, Sr. undergoes his own changes in lifestyle and direction, and Hawke’s performance is winsome, organic and so lived-in that we feel we’ve known this guy for years. He’s never been better.

Mason, Sr, though, is but a part of the sweeping tapestry Linklater weaves. After all, it wouldn’t be a true Linklater film without a gallery of supporting players, and in that capacity, Boyhood delivers in spades, from Olivia’s succession of husbands struggling with substance abuse, to Mason’s micromanaging high school teacher/newspaper editor, to Mason, Sr.’s slob of a roommate. They help make a film that’s greater than the sum of its parts even more memorable. Linklater also uses cultural signposts, like the Harry Potter books and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, to help viewers become situated as to where they are chronology-wise.

If, at 166 minutes, Boyhood feels too long, it’s because as Mason gets older, the film begins to be driven more and more by wordy and lengthy conversation sequences than anywhere else in the film, making its final hour feel unusually lopsided. The dialogue is engaging, rife as it is with Linklater’s existential queries – Waking Life, anyone? – but the film had heretofore unfolded with such taut, controlled efficiency than its attempts at capturing the messiness of adolescence by exploring the protagonist’s intellectual awakening just made this reviewer more aware of its running time.

It doesn’t help that, as Mason enters puberty, he sports radically different hairstyles and wardrobe, occasionally making him look younger in later years by comparison, thus setting the time-lapse rhythm Linklater had sustained up until this point.

However, the extensive length also plays a crucial role in the film’s devastating cumulative effect. Boyhood is filled with rich individual moments, such as when Mason, Sr. embarrasses Samantha by asking her about about her first boyfriend, or when Mason, Jr. is visibly hurt when he realizes his father had forgotten a promise he’d made in passing but ultimately didn’t keep. (You’ll recognize the scene the moment you see it.) As rich as those slivers of time are, it’s the way they’re stitched together that gives Linklater’s film its resonance, never more so than in a scene in which Olivia copes with the realization that her children are, a) no longer children and b) leaving the nest. The True Romance actress could have settled for easy tears, but the overlapping roller coaster of emotions she conveys in just a few minutes is astonishing.

If there’s a prior movie precedent for Boyhood, it’s Michael Apted’s Up documentaries, which began as a TV production that followed the lives of 14 British children from different social backgrounds in 1964 and evolved into an ongoing series of features in which the filmmaker checks in with the same subjects every seven years, examining how their lives and outlooks on a variety of issues may have changed in the interim. With the Before films, Linklater has gone down a similar road before, but never in such methodical fashion.

In many ways, Boyhood is a summation of Linklater’s body of work, not only because it integrates so many elements from all his films – the only-in-Texas character portraits in Slacker and Bernie; the effortlessly natural way he directed children in School of Rock and his The Bad News Bears remake – but because it fuses his recurring thematic motifs so cohesively. It shows an already empathetic director at his most humane and, both despite and (mostly) because of its scope, it’s a milestone in a career that’s usually been a cause for celebration. Here’s to the in-between moments that make our lives unique.

Boyhood is showing at several area theaters, including the Coral Gables Art Cinema, where its engagement is scheduled to end Aug. 7. It is set to open at additional Miami theaters Aug. 1.