2022 seems to be the year where a lot of filmmakers got super-nostalgic and wanted to share that with their audiences. This will mark the fourth film I’ve looked at in the last twelve months involving a director dramatising their childhood, and the fifth involving a director dramatising themselves in general. Except what Richard Linklater has put together here goes further into the fictionalised side of things than his contemporaries, as it starts out with Stanley (Milo Coy) being picked out of the school yard by NASA to be part of their space program, but then reveals itself to be much less fantastical than that would imply.
Same as with Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Linklater is back at it with rotoscoped animation, and for the story being told here, I’d argue it’s the best fit of the three. The effect of cel-shaded graphics put on top of living actors adds to the sensation that we’re watching something that actually happened, but covered up a bit with movie magic. The visuals on their own look great, giving a family-friendly Archer-esque look to the snapshots of Stanley’s childhood, while the work done to animate the many movies, TV shows, and even songs that make up a lot of those cherished memories involves brushstroke effects that give the feeling of living paintings, which is pretty cool.
Being able to create tangible nostalgia for the ‘60s, the era of Vietnam, the Cold War, the JFK assassination, and the great evil that is hearing Sugar Sugar by The Archie on radio rotation, is no easy feat nowadays. But what Linklater has done here is acknowledge that it wasn’t all fun and joy, it successfully isolates the experiences shown as being through the eyes of a child. All that stuff to do with war and politics were the business of adults, whereas his biggest worries were baseball drills and sneaking into the drive-in theatre. It’s carefree, but without being disingenuous about it.
To that end, the amount of detail given to the minutiae of Stanley’s suburban life is fascinating in a way that just raw documentary or written biography wouldn’t have been able to replicate. Amidst all the pop culture, including plentiful examples of contemporaneous sci-fi flicks, the most interesting moments come from him just playing with his friends and family. All those little beats to do with the games they’d come up with, or the practices that were totally normal at the time but are a bit eyebrow-raising looking back at them to do with bug exterminators and tar stains on your feet after going to the beach, are stripped of any cold historical recollection, sticking to the personal connection to the era.
This is most evident in the film’s focus on the Apollo mission; not the titular fictional one, but the real one. Living in Texas, with most of his neighbourhood being involved one way or another with the operations of NASA, Stanley (and by extension Linklater himself) sees the Moon landing as a communal event. Beyond just the amount of people required to make it happen, or even just the ideal of humanity as a whole reaching for the stars, the degree to which space travel dominated the cultural zeitgeist during the U.S./Russian Space Race will likely never be repeated in his or even my lifetime. And through the imagination of this kid, the audience gets to share in that moment in history, seeing Stanley flip back and forth between his and his family’s fevered attention turned towards the TV transmission of the landing, and Stanley imagining himself sitting in the module.
There’s a purity to this film’s desire to put the audience in a specific moment in time (and space, ba-dum-tish) that I find oddly refreshing. It exists for no reason other than to preserve not even the history, but the memory of the history. The cultural atmosphere where fears of the world coming to an end for one reason or another were easily dismissed, because we were making greater advances than any had ever seen before, and all grown from a collective sense of adventure. While I recognise that there are some… questionable attitudes that get caught up in feelings of nostalgia, eschewing the need to move forward with a desire to stay in the warmth of recollection, this is far too earnest and sweet to feel in any way sinister like that. The moment being highlighted is one of great progress, after all.
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