In 2002, Richard Linklater began shooting a film under the vague title of “The 12-Year Project.” Its production would be audacious, and unprecedented: Linklater proposed to film for just a few days each year, in roughly one-year intervals, over the course of a protagonist’s life from first grade to college, so that the audience would witness the character and his family (as well as the actors playing those roles) actually aging through the course of the story. Linklater had shown his temporal and youthful enchantments in previous efforts such as Dazed and Confused (1993) and Before Sunrise (1995), yet what became Boyhood in 2014 was the most concerted and comprehensive depiction of coming-of-age ever attempted in cinema history, defying the Bildungsroman tradition that is so often invested in sentimentality and marred by melodrama. In dismissing a traditional short-term shooting schedule and resisting a conventional narrative structure, Linklater made Boyhood into a chronicle of youth untethered to industrial and generic confines that resulted in a certain timeless universality relating to the lives of American children in the early twenty-first century.

The protagonist of Boyhood, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), evolves through transitions from one year to the next that are often quite subtle, and some of which are detectable only by nuance. Even as Linklater shows Mason continuing through his school years, he eschews obvious markers such as captions or title cards to depict Mason growing through changes in friendships, fashions, and attitudes, resulting in a canny statement on the often unpredictable ways in which young people mature. We see Mason advance through his varying living conditions, his shifting social circle, and the visible fluctuations of his hairstyle. While his family relocates to different homes across southern Texas after his parents’ divorce, we discern Mason’s encroaching departure from boyhood itself as he moves toward high school graduation, leaving home, and going off to college. Linklater has said he “wanted the movie to seem like the memory of a young life, just rolling through time,” and he captures that through this smooth growth of Mason on screen, void of many celebrated rituals that children have forced upon them, like holidays, vacations, and ceremonies.