I have followed the career of Richard Linklater almost obsessively for my entire movie watching life. An influential independent voice for 25 years, he’s contributed an unique and extremely diverse body of work to American cinema. He’s made a great film starring Zac Efron about Orson Welles, the best Phillip K. Dick adaptation of the past 30 years, and School of Rock.

Today’s release of his minimalist epic Boyhood provides a great time to stop and remember the varied and excellent body of work of Richard Linklater. Not all of his films are here, but most of them are because, frankly, most of them are really good.

Slacker, 1991

Linklater’s film career kicks off with Richard Linklater himself, resting his head on the window of a bus, then narrating a vivid dream sequence to a cab driver. “There was nothing going on in it all, it was like the Omega Man, there was just nobody around. I was just traveling around, staring out windows of buses, trains and cars. When I was at home I was flipping through the TV stations endlessly. Reading. How many dreams do you have where you read in the dream?”

I’m tempted to say that Linklater’s entire career is captured in the first five minutes of his first film. This would be true, to an extent. The mundane aspects of life are the meatiest subjects of his films: walking through streets talking, forming relationships, the endlessness of youth, the interior processing of ideas, the consequences of our most simple decisions. These are the subjects that will define Richard Linklater’s next two decades of work.

But it would sell short the growth of the director to say everything is in this moment. Really, it’s just a dynamic self-encapsulated monologue that thematically captures the spirit of Linklater the director: sort of aimless, but highly purposeful. Which is what Slacker is all about. No plot and no character development, just a well crafted film about ideas being shared by people passing in the street.

Dazed and Confused, 1994

Dazed and Confused is a natural sophomore release after Slacker. It’s a hangout movie (the best ever, I’d say) with little plot, but this time with a little more money, and more direction. It introduces Wiley Wiggins as the Linklater stand-in, who will return a decade later to guide audiences through another wandering dream. But mostly, it solidifies Linklater’s key interests: Texas, youth, and time.

The keys to the Linklater Cannon are these three subjects. The director’s ties to Austin are a constant presence, and everything from Slacker to Bernie are imbued with Linklater’s Texas. The glow of remembered youth also weaves though his work. But what I love most about Linklater is his simultaneously abstract and concrete injection of time into his work. Nostalgia is a real thing, but the effects of time are rarely concrete in our lives.

There’s obvious nostalgia for the past in Dazed and Confused, but all that happens is filling time. High-school here is about getting through 4 years alive. That’s a lot of time to fill. And at the end of the day, there are only a few options for how to fill it. Hang out, drink beers, parties, pool, music. Looking back as an adult, there was not a lot to do, while waiting for life to start. “If I ever start saying these are the best days of my life,” the high-school QB says in one of the best lines of the 90s, “remind me to kill myself.”

Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, 1995, 2004, 2013

The Before Trilogy is about a romantic relationship started by two people in their 20s, and carried out over 2 decades. In Before Sunrise, a Texas man Jesse (fellow Austin native and featured Linklater player Ethan Hawke) meets a French woman named Celine (Julie Delpy) on a train in Vienna. The two clearly have a connection, and agree to spend 1 day together before parting forever. Linklater, Delpy and Hawke have returned to the characters every 9 years, allowing audiences a chance to spy on how the passage of time changes a relationship. In Before Sunset, the two reconnect in Paris, and Before Midnight, in Greece. The films all partake in the Linklater walk-and-talk model, with three different, beautiful European cities as backdrop.

The trilogy is all about time. The impact of a decade away effects not only Jesse and Celine’s relationship, but the audience’s connection to the characters as well. Sunrise is a romantic idyll, a fantasy of (my) youth played out on a trip through Europe, as two people share their thoughts and dreams and fall for each other instantly. Seen in my teenage years the film essentially turned me into a romantic nutter and wrecked more than a few relationships.

A decade later, Sunset picks up the struggle of lost romance and the need to face reality. Jesse is unhappily married and has a son; Celine has a job that weighs her down constantly. Their time in Vienna was cute and meant a lot but what can it mean, now, today? The older you get the harder it is to to hold to those old notions of romance and idealism. The meaning of one-day in ecstasy is a memory now of only one day. But it’s not yet time to give up on love, and it takes long to time to get over a lost opportunity.

Then, with Midnight, comes life, children, years together, fights, scheduled sex that goes awry. Time has weighed down not only the romantic ideals of youth, but the bodies that carried them as well. A life together is about sacrifice, and Jesse and Celine have tried hard to make it work, clearly, but it’s not enough to want it to work.

Watching Jesse and Celine age together in these three films over 20 years has been one of the most important cinematic experiences in my life.

Waking Life, 2001

Ten years after Slacker comes Waking Life, another film composed entirely of vignettes, but this time with a single character to navigate our way through (Wiley Wiggins back from Dazed and Confused). Waking Life is about dreaming, waking dreams, the blurred distinction between dreams and reality. It’s a beautifully made film, photographed and then painted afterwards, and the style is about as effective a rendering of dreams as one can imagine.

One criticism that I have heard of Richard Linklater’s films is that it’s all about talking, there’s no development or action, just writing dialogue to hear people talk. But that’s wrong. That’s the Quentin Tarantino model. What Waking Life, and other Linklater films are about not so much talking as listening. Not listening to fancy dialogue but hearing people talk to each other about subjects that excite people. It’s fun to be excited about an idea, and hearing people be excited is exciting itself. In Waking Life it just so happens in a dream reality, so listening is even a bit more fun.

Tape, 2001

Tape is Linklater’s micro-film. Taking place in real time, the story spans only 86 minutes. It’s set in a single hotel room, with only three actors, Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leanord. Released the same year as Waking Life, the two films could not be more differnet. Where Waking Life ruminates and floats about the streets in the tradition of Slacker and the Before Trilogy, Tape is all intention and scheme. It is tight and direct in a way none of Linklater’s previous films were.

Roger Ebert’s review of Tape is one of my fave’s, so I’ll defer to him.

The writing, acting and direction are so convincing that at some point I stopped thinking about the constraints and started thinking about the movie’s freedoms: freedom from idiocy, first of all, since the characters are all smart and articulate, and testing each other’s nerve and values. Freedom from big gassy meaningless events. Freedom from the tyranny of an overbearing soundtrack that wants to feel everything for us. Freedom from the expected.

This is why I love Linklater: Freedom from idiocy.

School of Rock, 2003

With School of Rock, the scope of Richard Linklater’s work expanded substantially. Here-to-fore Linklater had been a darling of American Independent Cinema, and he remains one. But School of Rock breaks that mold. A big comedy starring Jack Black about a burn-out faking his way into a substitute teaching job and teaching children how to play rock n’ roll? This is not the stuff we’ve come to expect.

It’s been more than 10 years since School of Rock came out, but back on 2003, this was a pretty strange turn for Linklater. I had just finished my senior thesis on his work, and can say I was skeptical. But it’s wonderful. It hits the marks it needs to for an “off-beat comedy,” and it’s all about nostalgia and aging, two major refrains of Linklater’s career.

School of Rock was a big hit, critically and at the box-office, and Linklater spent the next few years away from the meandering plots and character studies. It’s also the first film that he made concurrently with Boyhood.

A Scanner Darkly, 2006

Before School of Rock, I never would have imagined a Linklater sci-fi adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel. But here it is, in A Scanner Darkly. This movie returns to the visual style of Waking Life, an animated style that matches well the police-state-dystopia-drug-induced-paranoia craziness that is A Scanner Darkly.

Funny and really, really weird, the film is probably the best PKD adaptation since Blade Runner.

Me and Orson Welles, 2008

Me and Orson Welles is simultaneously a portrait of a great man, Welles, and a love-letter to the craft of storytelling. Christian McKay plays Welles, and Zac Efron a young actor named Richard Samuels who spends a week in Welles’ company. The story follows a production of “Julius Ceasar” staged in Mussolini’s Italy.

The film is about theater and the life of the stage, and it’s moving mostly because it is a big portrait of a big man doing great things. Linklater has for the most part centered his films in small stories about people who are I suppose we would call ordinary (I hate these kinds of terms, but they are effective here). Given this, watching Linklater and McKay give Orson Welles the room to be “Orson Welles” is striking, and it looks and feels unlike anything Linklater had previously made (a recurring theme between 2001 and 2011). We know who Orson Welles will become, what time will do with this man, and watching him in this early phase in a glossy looking picture like this is a wild time.

Watching the story of a young ambitious filmmaker does bring to mind that first scene of Slacker, when Linklater appeared on-screen to kick off his own film-making career. Before Me and Orson Welles was released, I rewatched A Scanner Darkly to get in the Linklater groove. After watching the pair back to back I thought to myself: There’s no movie Richard Linklater cannot make.

Bernie, 2011

I enjoy the back-to-back nature of Bernie and Me and Orson Welles. Though the men could not be more unlike in person or surrounding, they are both supremely confident men capable of attracting everyone around them with their words and manner. In Bernie, Linklater gives Bernie Tiede a similar treatment, a starring role in a movie about a man who impacts everything around him. The difference I suppose is that this story is about a man who kills an old woman.

Bernie Tiede, as Linklater directs him and Jack Black plays him, is funny, effeminate, charming man. Everyone in the small town of Carthage, Texas including an old, wealthy woman known for being unlikable named Marge, loves him. The film ends when Bernie is convicted of killing Marge Nugent, and sent to prison.

Bernie is a very Texas movie. It combines documentary style interviews with the real citizens of Carthage with a narrative telling of the story. And despite it’s dark subject matter, Bernie is probably the funniest film Linklater has made since Dazed and Confused.

The aftermath of Bernie must be mentioned: Linklater campaigned for the release of the real life Bernie Tiede, who was granted release from prison into the custody of the director. Bernie now lives in Linklater’s home in Austin.

Boyhood, 2014

As of right now, Boyhood has a perfect 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with 84 reviews in the books. The culmination of a 12-year shooting process, the film is something special. Ellar Coltrane was 6 years old when he was cast as Mason, and for the next decade he, Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei, sporadically gathered the crew in Texas and made what by all accounts is a film unlike anything that has come before it.

I wrote in that thesis back in 2003 about how time impacted the characters in Richard Linklater’s films, and so it is appropriate perhaps to end this laudatory recap with another Texan, Matt Zoller Seitz, discussing the same subject as it relates to Boyhood.

Time, and our interaction with time, and the way in which we are all ultimately overmatched and worn down by time, and the notion of cinema as a means of sculpting with time: these and other aspects of temporality are at the heart of “Boyhood.” Time is the core around which all of this movie’s musings on childhood and parenthood are woven. It’s the river down which the scenes and characters travel without consciously realizing that they are on individual journeys that all have the same ending. If life is “about” anything, it’s about realizing and accepting that fact: that everything is fleeting.

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Richard Linklater feature image credit: Tamir Kalifa, Daily Texan