Richard Lin­klater: Dream is Destiny

There is already a great doc­u­men­tary about the work­ing prac­tices of Austin’s favourite son, Richard Lin­klater. It’s called Dou­ble Play: Richard Lin­klater and James Ben­ning, and it was made by Gabe Klinger in 2013. Instead of traips­ing on a bio­graph­i­cal tour through the director’s life and work with added com­men­tary and clips, Klinger fil­ters the mate­r­i­al through an artis­tic friend­ship, and tak­ing great pains to use the films as a way to draw styl­is­tic and ide­o­log­i­cal par­al­lels between the two artists.

Karen Bern­stein and Louis Black’s Richard Lin­klater: Dream Is Des­tiny, by con­trast, is a scrap­py com­pendi­um of filched odds and sods with the feel of an elec­tron­ic press kit. It comes across like an unof­fi­cial biog­ra­phy replete with a cou­ple of sol­id tes­ti­mo­ni­als from famous col­lab­o­ra­tors, a few choice snip­pets of archive mate­r­i­al and lots of excerpts from DVD extras. Lin­klater lends his easy­go­ing pres­ence to the film, allow­ing the film­mak­ers into his utopi­an ranch where he does all of his creatin’.

Oth­er­wise, this is a pro­ces­sion of peo­ple find­ing dif­fer­ent ways to explain why ​“Rick” is such an awe­some dude, a genius film­mak­er and an irre­press­ible mav­er­ick whose career defies indus­try log­ic. The films them­selves aren’t explored in any crit­i­cal detail, in most cas­es with Bern­stein and Black accept­ing the Rot­ten Toma­toes-enshrined leg­end. Every­thing from 2005’s Bad News Bears to 2011’s Bernie is hasti­ly dis­missed as sec­ond tier Lin­klater in a race to roll the con­ver­sa­tion towards his award sea­son titan, Boyhood.

Fans of the direc­tor will already be keyed in to most of this. It pass­es the time for sure, but this is the exact­ly the type of lazy, gener­ic docu-dirge that Lin­klater him­self would nev­er touch with a 10-foot, wonki­ly ani­mat­ed barge pole.