Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny

This life-affirming industry documentary restores faith in the outsider with a portrait of boyishly indefatigable Texan film-maker Richard Linklater, the small-town baseball-scholarship dreamer who worked on an oil rig to raise cash for camera equipment, moved to the characterful Austin, started a film society and scored a hit with the personal, generation-defining Slacker in 1991 (budget: $23,000). Co-directors South by Southwest festival founder Louis Black (seen reminiscing with Linklater on camera) and Karen Bernstein pool down-home testimony from family, collaborators and fans (Kevin Smith says that seeing Slacker kick-started his indie career). But it's the on-set footage that brings Linklater alive, showing him in complete, Orson Welles-like control while breezily accessible and open. His refusal to quit Austin for Hollywood (which didn't stop him having his biggest hit with studio-backed School of Rock) inspires regular collaborator Ethan Hawke's assessment: "He doesn't need anybody else to make his dreams come true." Never shy about its subject's leaner periods and noble failures, the film shows Linklater losing the best director Oscar for Boyhood to Alejandro G Iñárritu for Birdman, but there is no sore-loser commentary from the robbed visionary himself. Instead, we leave him in his own Edenic, eco-friendly, Texan version of Skywalker Ranch, pondering his next self-generating move.