Apollo 10½ review – Richard Linklater’s sensational coming-of-ager heads for the stars

R ichard Linklater is looking back from outer space at childhood and his blue remembered hills in this intensely enjoyable and sweet family movie. It's a rotoscope animation that is based on live action, and it's as cultish and hallucinatory as the ones that Linklater has made before, like Waking Life from 2001 and A Scanner Darkly from 2006

Stan, a 10-year-old boy, is growing up in a Houston suburb in the late 60s in a big family with a dad employed in a lowly admin job at NASA. Stan is obsessed with the Apollo 11 moon mission, and has a vivid imagination that he has been selected to be a test astronaut for a top-secret dummy-run moon landing. They need a kid of the highest caliber to pilot the thing down to the moon's surface and bring it back home to assure Neil, Buzz and Michael that they'll be okay.

Linklater makes a dream of kid heroism only a small part of the film, which is mostly a real, almost novelistically low-key account of what it was like to be a kid in Houston in the late 60s. It's a nonstop madeleine-fest, a revival of memories, something to compare with Joe Brainard's 1970 memoir I Remember, about the ice-cream flavours, the TV shows, and the drive-in movies. The 1950 movie Destination Moon, based on Robert Heinlein's 1947 novel, was praised for predicting almost everything about the Apollo missions.

Stan has no crush on anyone, and we don't hear about it for his older siblings. The one allusion to this issue comes when the Nasa agents show him the fake photos from the summer camp they have fabricated to explain his absence doing this secret mission. The shy love story that another coming-of-age-type movie might have created in parallel with the spaceshot isn't there. Stan's actual romance is with the moon. When the family gathers around the TV to watch the moon landing, real life becomes ecstatic with Stan's dream, and the rotoscope animation helps conceal the join.

A Space Age Childhood is an echo of Boyhood. Youth is a great theme of Linklater's, but it is presented without any moralising or emotional narrative. Being young is. It is disappointing that this film is not being shown on the big screen.