For a director known for drawing on a lot of his own reference points for movies, whether it be experiences, interactions, or thought processes, Richard Linklater has not made a film more personal than Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood. He grew up in Houston during the heyday of the Apollo program in the 1960s, a stone’s throw from NASA, and though he personally didn’t have any connection to that industry, he knew plenty of kids whose parents did. Essentially, it was the front lines of the space race, and it makes sense such an environment would fuel so much imagination. Everybody knew a kid growing up who wanted to be an astronaut after all. Imagine if real astronauts were just down the road.
So Linklater decided to elaborate on that fantasy while also sharing in detail the intricacies of life for a kid in that place and time. And to do this he chose animation as the best desired format, his first foray into the medium since 2006’s A Scanner Darkly. Like that film and his earlier Waking Life, it heavily employs a digital rotoscope style of animation around filmed footage -although in this case that footage is almost entirely just the actors. It’s much more sophisticated than either of his previous movies, the technique has come far as something like the Amazon series Undone has proven (although both those movies in fairness are visually crude by virtue of their experimental design). It’s a very pleasing film to look at, which is appropriate given the sincerity of its’ nostalgia.
The promotional material might lead you to believe the movie concentrates mostly on this fantasy of nine year-old Houston suburb native Stanley (Milo Coy) becoming the secret first person on the Moon due to a mishap at NASA resulting in a Lunar Lander too small for an adults’ proportions. But really this is just the backdrop for a highly detailed series of loosely structured episodes, a fittingly meandering account of the ins and outs of childhood in that time and place, at least as Linklater remembers it. Narrated by a grown-up Stanley in the form of Jack Black, it’s a picture of both the mundane and the unique in concert with one another that is deeply interesting. Stanley will share memories of fighting with his siblings for control of the T.V., but also of how NASA jets would occasionally swoop at high speed overhead. For folks of a younger generation, there are familiar beats of trips to a local theme park or playing dangerous schoolyard games, and yet a prevalence of astronomic hysteria tied into these and so many other aspects of daily life that is extremely foreign to us.
Linklater remembers it all vividly and the magic of Apollo 10½ is in its’ specificity. Stuff like the circle on the school wall troublesome students were made to stick their nose to being just a little too high, or the novelty of mimicking music using push-button phones, or going on day trips to Galveston beach and coming home with feet dirty from some recent oil spill in the gulf. Kids play sports in the middle of the street, ditch a drive-in movie to spy on couples making out, and of course, their minds never too far from space, enact their own rocket launch with toys and a captured grasshopper in the field next to the water treatment plant. With their parents they go into the city and gawk at hippies in the university district, steer the car while dad has a beer in the drivers’ seat, making sure of course to drop the tab in the can, and discuss the distinctions between rednecks and white trash along the way –at least when the kids aren’t piled into the back of the family pick-up.
Whether its’ Linklater’s skills as a storyteller or the vivacity of the animation itself, these details and vignettes really stick and sustain your engagement even as they don’t appear to drive to a singular point. Merely relishing in this world is enough. Black, who’s done his best work with Linklater, is the perfect vessel to relate all this it must be said too. Not just in the charm and interest in which he delivers every line, but his own personal relationship to the subject matter (his mother Judith Love Cohen famously worked on the Apollo Program during this time) lends a considerable and palpable authenticity to the voice through which these pictures are contextualized. The rest of the cast are mostly unknowns, likely recruited from around Austin, to again accentuate that level of realism, with the exceptions of Glen Powell and Zachary Levi as the NASA officials who enlist Stanley in the first place, guiding him through his astronaut training.
On that note, the astronaut side of things is really interesting too, Stanley narrating it in such a charming matter-of-fact way that feels incredibly genuine to the subjectivity of children’s fantasies. Stanley “recalls” so many processes of prep, from studying up on engineering to enacting disaster scenarios before embarking on the mission itself, all of it played with a fun amount of character and emotional sincerity. And I admire that Linklater never makes some obvious gesture to Stanley’s imagination, he doesn’t feel the need to be typically blunt about where the line between fiction and reality exists -he trusts his audience to know the difference. He also understands that for kids a lot of their fantasies are very real -as much so as anything in the tangible world, because they inform and indeed foster a sense of self, of desire and inspiration and ambition. Dreaming about being the first person on the moon allows Stanley to find his identity, comprehend his place in the world. This movie translates that perspective aptly, making no concessions for it. As much as it purports an adult looking back on his childhood, it is the boys’ interpretation that holds sway.
Of course it’s easy to be cynical about this boomer nostalgia, especially in the age of historical re-evaluation deeply opposed to any rose-tinted view of the past. Linklater is aware of this, alluding to this fact and the greater issues of the day (following on Summer of Soul, he also includes among dozens of media clips, the Harlem man protesting the Apollo program’s waste of resources that could better serve marginalized communities). But he is steadfast and honest in his subject of lower middle-class white kids in suburban Texas who don’t much interact with such larger contexts. And Apollo 10½, for all its’ graceful reminiscence, doesn’t glorify its’ era at all -it never opines that this was a better time to be alive or expresses much in the way of longing. It simply exists as Linklater remembers it, with that fondness that comes with memory. It’s the attachment to experiences that has value more than the experiences themselves, as nifty and interesting for another generation as those experiences may be.
The movie’s not perfect -it could have used a little more consistency in interweaving its’ two threads -the astronaut stuff is dropped for a good half hour. And while the animation is great, it never gets to be all that creative or experimental, certainly not in the way of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly -but even in its confined structural parameters there was room to be a little more ambitious. For the most part though, Apollo 10½ is quietly riveting. It’s intoxicating and sweet and very funny. I seem to recall Linklater likening the movie to a form of historical preservation -an artifact of childhood for the space age generation. Whether the movie lives up to that on either a general or highly specific sense, it is certainly a vivid portrait -and much like the best portraits, it is a joy to lose yourself in.
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