Producers: Michèle Pétin and Laurent Pétin   Director: Richard Linklater   Screenplay: Holly Gent, Vince Palmo, Michèle Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson   Cast: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Adrien Rouyard, Antoine Besson, Jodie Ruth Forest, Bruno Dreyfürst, Benjamin Clery, Matthieu Penchinat, Pauline Belle, Blaise Pettebone, Benoît Bouthors, Paolo Luka Noé, Jade Phan-Gia, Fanck Cicurel, Roxane Rivière, Jean-Jacques Le Vessier, Côme Thieulin, Laurent Mothe, Jonas Marmy, Niko Ravel, Alix Bénézech, Aurélien Lorgnier and Tom Novembre   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: B+

Like Richard Linklater’s last film—the delicious “Blue Moon”—”Nouvelle Vague” pays homage to artistic creativity.  But while the poignant but funny portrait of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, in the twilight of his career, focused on the stage, this one centers on Linklater’s own bailiwick, filmmaking, specifically on the triumph of Jean-Luc Godard in making his first movie, “Breathless,” in his own way.  Both films, of course, will appeal especially to niche audiences, the first to theatre buffs and the second to cineastes.  But each is incredibly attentive to detail and is so masterfully made that both should pique interest in viewers outside the niches though they might need a bit of help on the contexts.    

In some ways “Vague” is the more remarkable of the two. Directors who don’t speak English have rarely overcome the lack in making English-language movies, but though Linklater doesn’t speak French, he’s made a film that’s largely in that language (though with plenty of English sections) that seems utterly fluent.  And one that’s engaging even for those who don’t know “Breathless,” though naturally familiarity with it will enhance one’s enjoyment.  (To stream it, though, you’ll need MAX, not Netflix.)

Linklater and his collaborators cinematographer David Chambille and editor Catherine Schwartz don’t try to mimic the style of “Breathless.” Though they shoot the film in Godard’s luminously silvery black-and-white and boxy framing, they eschew the helter-skelter cutting and transitions that felt revolutionary back in 1960.  And to recreate the locations Goddard used along with the period atmosphere, they depend on scads of VFX as well as Katia Wyszkop’s production design and Pascaline Chavanne’s costumes.

What Linklater and his scripters—Holly Gent, Vince Palmo, Michèle Halberstadt and Laetitia Masson—do reflect from Godard’s film is the larky enthusiasm behind its making as a twenty-day quickie embodying both Godard’s love of the spirit behind American movies and his determination to follow his own lights in giving “Breathless” a distinctive rhythm and spontaneity.  “Nouvelle Vague,” which came to define the movement in which Godard played a major part, celebrates the unconventionality of Godard’s method but in a fashion that’s stylistically quite conventional. 

It begins with Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), a dour-looking fellow in dark glasses but with an impish, often derisive, sense of humor, bemoaning the fact that he’s behind his fellow critics at the Cahiers du Cinėma in actually making movies.  His friends Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) and François Truffaut (Adrian Rouyard) have already made a splash with “Le Beau Serge” and “Les quatre cents coups,” and he’s anxious to do likewise.  So he convinces producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to bankroll a modestly-budgeted genre movie, based on a scenario by Truffaut, about a charismatic crook who goes on the run in Paris after killing a policeman and hooks up with an expatriate American girl, who will ultimately be faced with a decision whether to turn him in to the cops pursuing him.

With money in hand Goddard recruits his leads, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), a boxer who’d just returned from military service in Algeria, as the crook Michel, and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), the Otto Preminger discovery whose then-husband François Moreuil (Paolo Luka Noé) persuaded her the movie would be a good career move after “Saint Joan” and “Bonjour Tristesse,” to play Patricia, the girl who shelters him on the lam. 

It becomes clear from the first day of shooting that Goddard’s approach is unique.  He’ll make decisions on the fly—or not at all, since when he’s uninspired, or hasn’t come up with dialogue for something to shoot, he’ll simply declare things finished for the day. 

His way, at once peremptory and filled with gnomic utterances (“one is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary”) bewilders his collaborators (for while emphasizing Godard’s my-way-or-the-highway method Linklater and his also show that “Breathless” was a collaborative effort).  They respond differently, of course.  Belmondo rolls with the punches, never losing the cool for which he becomes famous, while Beauregard is apoplectic over the lack of discipline.  Seberg is so perplexed that she considers walking off the project, but Moreuil convinces her to stick it out.

Meanwhile script supervisor (Pauline Belle) is flummoxed by Godard’s making up scenes at the last moment and his lack of concern for simple continuity (“continuity is not reality”), but cameraman Raoul Coutard (Benjamin Clery) merely goes along with whatever’s demanded of him: a war photographer hired to give things a documentary feel, the gangly fellow squeezes himself and his camera into a rolling bin to surreptitiously capture a street scene that will feature passersby as unwitting extras.  Yet Godard has hired an experienced assistant in Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery), who proves adept in responding without qualm to his every whim.  And when it comes to the editing process, Goddard orders the staff not to cut whole scenes, but just unnecessary parts of them, which leads to that jerky rhythm for which the movie became famous.

And while the entire object is to show how what Godard was doing contributed to a movement that was thought of as “new,” the passing of the torch to a new generation of filmmakers, “Nouvelle Vague” is also intent on demonstrating that it wasn’t born ex nihilo. The script repeatedly shows how established director encouraged and advised Goddard and his contemporaries, whether it be through vigorous pep talks like one delivered by Roberto Rosselini (Laurent Mothe) during a visit to the Cahiers offices, or the mixture of complaints and suggestions given Godard by Robert Bresson (Aurélien Lorgnier) during a chance meeting in the Parisian subway where the older man is working on his film, though he’s much more concerned with continuity.  Perhaps the most engaging of these interventions comes when voluble Jean-Pierre Melville (Tom Novembre) agrees to ad-lib a scene in which he’s interviewed by Patricia in her job as a journalist.

They’re far from the only real personages who appear, however briefly, here.  One will glimpse Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth Forest), Agnès Varda (Roxane Rivière), Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) and Juliette Greco (Alix Bénézech), among others.  But not to worry: Linklater provides their names in accompanying captions, and there’s no final quiz that requires you to remember them.  Film buffs, however, will appreciate their presence, even in a single shot.

Some will perhaps criticize “Nouvelle Vague” as an exercise in cinematic insularity, done up in a way that might be thought precious.  What rescues it is Linklater’s sincerity.  The film isn’t just a trick—it’s a genuine love-letter not to Godard’s early style (which in his later years grew increasingly heavy and pretentious) but to the liberation it proclaimed from stylistic expectations that were thought of as stale and confining.  Linklater makes his films, including this one, very differently from the way Godard made “Breathless,” but the freedom that film bestowed on later directors animated Linklater’s career, from “Slackers” onward.  In making “Nouvelle Vague” he pays tribute not only to Godard’s break with the past but his profound influence on the future, including himself.

Producers: Mike Blizzard, John Sloss and Richard Linklater   Director: Richard Linklater   Screenplay: Robert Kaplow   Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott, Patrick Kennedy, Jonah Lees, Simon Delaney, Cillian Sullivan, John Doran and Anne Brogan   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: B+

Few directors are more adept in making films that are all talk so utterly fascinating as Richard Linklater.  It’s a feat he showed mastery over as long ago as his first film, “Slackers” (1991), and the facility is on full display again in this sad and funny portrait of Broadway librettist Lorenz Hart as he wrestles with the enormous success of his former colleague, composer Richard Rodgers, on March 31, 1943, the opening night of “Oklahoma!,” which Rodgers had written in collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II.

Except for a glimpse of Hart watching the show in increasing distaste from a box in the St. James Theatre at the start, the film is set entirely at the bar inside Sardi’s Restaurant, where the post-opening party will occur as the reviews roll in.  Leaving the theatre early, Hart arrives before anyone else, trading quotes from “Casablanca” with his friend, Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) before turning to other topics in what amounts to virtual monologue addressed to Eddie and soldier-turned-piano player Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lees). 

He alternately expresses barbed praise for the new musical’s obvious audience appeal and irritation at its pandering to it (he keeps emphasizing that exclamation point) while pining for the arrival of his beautiful friend Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), with whom he hopes to cement a relationship despite his being a closeted gay man (though he calls himself omnisexual).  She’s a statuesque twenty-year old Yale student and aspiring production designer who longs for an introduction to Rodgers (her surviving correspondence was one of the sources for screenwriter Robert Kaplow); he’s short and forty-seven, with a glossy comb-over to conceal—unsuccessfully, of course—his balding pate.  To Eddie, and us, his chances appear dim.  

Larry, as he’s known, also has hope of reconnecting with Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and arranging to work with him again, on a musical of representing the sophisticated cynicism that’s his stock-in-trade.  No wonder that he’s annoyed that most people know him best for the eponymous title tune, whose sappy lyric he considers among his worst, though its first stanza (“me standing alone/without a dream in my heart/without a love of my own”) could apply to him.

Hart’s also in a tug-of-war between his attempt to tear himself away from addiction to booze and drugs and his obvious desire to give in to it.  That’s tested first when he falls into conversation with the bar’s only other patron, witty New Yorker contributor E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), who also feels at a low point (though he’ll go on to become the author of successful children’s books).  Hart’s delighted to trade drinks as well as banter with him—he’s especially taken with White’s description of himself as “superannuated”—and though Eddie tries to moderate his friend’s intake, eventually he gives up.

The upshot is that all of Larry’s impossible dreams dissipate over the course of the evening.  His struggle for sobriety ends, and by the evening’s close he’s inebriated as he goes off to a party he’s planning at his place knowing few will attend; less than a year later, he’ll die of pneumonia after collapsing on a New York street. One of those who doubtlessly won’t be coming is Elizabeth, who, in a beautifully modulated scene in the restaurant cloakroom, lets him down with the familiar line that she only wants to be friends (to make matters worse, she’s smitten with a handsome classmate who’s dumped her) before accepting Rodgers’ invitation to his after-party.  As for Rodgers, he’s open to renewing their collaboration only if Hart proves a reliable partner, and, rejecting his ludicrous idea for a musical about cannibals, offers what amounts to a test—writing some new numbers for a revival of one of their old shows.  But it’s clearly a sop: their temperaments are so different, with Rodgers the stable, practical businessman attuned to the soft-hearted temper of the times and Hart the incorrigibly brittle satirist—that a permanent reunion would be an implausibility.

No, Rodgers’ future lies with Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), as Hart ruefully recognizes.  In a brief meeting with the new lyricist, Hart keeps the venom in check and dishes out some insincere praise, but Oscar’s guest, an obnoxiously supercilious boy named Stephen (Cillian Sullivan), snorts derisively over a bit of Hart’s wordplay.  One of the best jokes in a screenplay that’s replete with them is that the kid, who will have a storied career in Broadway history himself, will appropriate Hart’s quip later, when he’s writing the opening number that will save his first solo musical during its tryout on the road. It’s far from the only moment here that Broadway aficionados will eat up.

Linklater and Hawke do an exceptional job in teasing out every nuance and witticism in the script, which is rather like a one-act play.  They also work wonders turning Hawke into a credible Hart.  The main effort is the actor’s: his squeaky voice, his affected mannerisms, his combination of pride and desperation, are all impeccably done; it’s another in what’s becoming a long line of extraordinary performances from Hawke.  But the two long-time collaborators—this is their ninth film together—work in tandem to transform the lanky, five-foot-ten star into a reasonable approximation of the diminutive, aging, rather prissy songwriter.  (In the 1948 fantasy biopic “Words and Music” Mickey Rooney got the height right, but little else.)  In that regard credit has to be shared with cinematographer Shane F. Kelly and production designer Susie Cullen, but Linklater’s employment of careful composition and framing to make Hawke appear to be five foot or less is both amusing and persuasive.  All the cast—easygoing Cannavale, scrumptious Qualley, rigorous Scott, subtle Kennedy, and the rest—do expert work, but in the end they’re like a talented chorus to Hawke’s triumphant tour de force.

The movie looks and moves well, with Kelly’s supple camerawork taking full advantage of Cullen’s glamorous production design and Consolata Boyle’s equally attractive costumes, with Sandra Adair’s smooth editing adding punch to the stream of dialogue.  Graham Reynolds’ background score contributes to the period detail provided by Rifkin’s keyboard doodling.

“Blue Moon” can be thought of as a sibling to Linklater’s underrated 2008 “Me and Orson Welles” (adapted from a novel by Kaplow), in which Christian McKay gave a performance as Broadway’s 1930s wunderkind every bit as remarkable as Hawke’s is here.  Like that film, and so many of Linklater’s others (think “Boyhood,” for example), it’s basically a stunt, but there are few things more exhilarating than a stunt that’s executed with absolute precision and panache, as this one is.  Moviegoers looking for bombastic action must look elsewhere, but anyone searching for action of the mind with a side order of poignancy should hasten to visit this delicious reimagining of Broadway’s golden age.