

My favourite coming-of-age film is not really a coming-of-age film at all. It is not the traditionally scripted, bittersweet lite-sexy dramedy about the teenager who finds out about love and the meaning of friendship over one unforgettable summer.

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It’s not really scripted at all, but it does conform to the maleness of the genre and it does more than any film to show what coming of age actually does look like in the real world: it is gradual, cumulative, but with key moments whose significance is appreciated afterwards rather than at the time. The film is Richard Linklater’s masterpiece Boyhood: an extraordinary, unique, time-lapse portrait of a young man called Mason growing up from primary school to his first day of college. Linklater worked over 12 years with the actor Ellar Coltrane, along with a cast including Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke playing his estranged parents, shooting for a couple of weeks every year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ellar Coltrane and Ethan Hawke in Boyhood. Photograph: IFC Films/Everett/Rex

Only the loosest storyline could be envisaged because of the difficulty in guaranteeing cast-members’ availability. Even putting Coltrane at the centre of the film was a risk. Linklater did not want to look too far ahead for fear of disappointment and chaos, and his directorial concern is actually very close to the way we think about our own lives, and our own reluctance to imagine our future in any detail. So the film, like life, rolls along, with Coltrane periodically getting bigger. His life is not given the retrospectively organised shape that other stories get.

This is not to say that the film doesn’t have its coming-of-agey moments: at 16, Mason drinks and smokes weed for the first time; at 17, he has a girlfriend; and at 18 he painfully breaks up with her, wins a photography prize and gets a college scholarship. These are important, emotional moments, but not foregrounded and privileged as definitive. It is gripping and moving in a unique way. In fact, the really climactic coming-of-age moment is assigned to Patricia Arquette as Mason’s long-suffering mother; she gives a wonderfully moving speech as Mason heads off to college and she confronts her empty-nest sadness and grasps the reality of life’s terrible shortness.

Boyhood is the film in which the coming-of-age genre itself actually grows up.

