Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch & Ethan Hawke Shake Up Godard’s Legacy—Twice Over

Olivia Bennett, 11/15/2025 Linklater double-dares Hollywood with "Nouvelle Vague" and "Blue Moon," blending Godardian mischief and Broadway melancholy. It’s a stylish pas de deux—one foot in smoky Paris, the other on a ghost-lit stage—proving rebellion stays chic, whether filmed in dazzling black-and-white or Broadway blue.

First, there’s “Nouvelle Vague,” a monochrome, madcap embrace of the wild-child genius that was Jean-Luc Godard. This isn’t some fussy homage, mind you—no glass cases, no whispered reverence. The film lurches and dances beneath curling smoke, a camera that’s as much an artifact as an accomplice, and a script that’s constantly threatening to spin off into glorious anarchy. Godard’s Paris wasn’t all existential sighs, nor was the French New Wave simply black turtlenecks and academic brooding. More often, it was an argument in a stairwell or four friends rioting through the city because, well, the rules had always been someone else’s problem.

Linklater, that ever-irreverent Texan, doesn’t just pay tribute—he stages something closer to a séance. Filmed on the original aspect ratio, all sharp shadows and jazz-age daylight, “Nouvelle Vague” crackles with the kind of immediacy that studio nostalgia can never quite fake. The real coup here? He tracked down the legendary camera that once caught Belmondo’s impish grin in “Breathless,” now liberated from Raoul Coutard’s private archive. The response when they found it? “Does it still work?” Apparently, it does—beautifully. Cameras have long memories, it seems.

The set was chaos—deliberately so. Actors sputtered in the face of improvisation, editors found themselves asked to forget everything they’d ever known about “continuity,” and somewhere in the tumult, Zoey Deutch seemed to molt from one persona into another. It’s rarely fair to toss around words like “chameleon” for actresses (Hollywood, for whatever reason, treats such shape-shifting as the territory of men), but here, Deutch claims it for herself. Her Seberg is mercurial, dazzling one moment, unexpectedly brittle the next, and always acutely aware of the camera—a performance that flirts with both the arrogance and the terror of youth.

Meanwhile, Linklater’s other offering, “Blue Moon,” is cut from an altogether different fabric. The brisk, riotous energy of “Nouvelle Vague” yields to a quieter, almost surgical dissection of creative exhaustion. Ethan Hawke brings Larry Hart to life—or to the comfortless half-life of the late-career Broadway burnout—under Linklater’s unsparing gaze. Every gesture is measured and questioned; there’s a constant tension between performance and authenticity. The director’s demand? Less Ethan, more Larry; take away the swagger, even if it takes the air out of the room. Hawke, for his part, reportedly began to wonder if Linklater even liked his acting, only to be reminded, dryly and affectionately, that after nine films together, he might just be overthinking it.

The release plan? Not much of a plan at all. There were jokes about “Use Your Illusion” double-albums, rumours of master strategies, but the truth, as often, is a happy accident. Both films, as it turns out, speak to beginnings—and endings—and perhaps, by a quirky logic, to Linklater’s own “Me and Orson Welles” as an unintentional third point in his trilogy about creative genesis and artistic twilight.

What surfaces from all this—the sprinting through sunlit Paris streets, the hollow echo on a Broadway stage in winter’s dusk—is less a lesson in film history than a high-wire act. Linklater balances the faithfulness of a scholar with the mirth of a trickster, always one eye on the giants whose shoulders he stands on, the other on his own muddy boots.

Some cling to the notion that “art films” are meant only for ascetics with infinite patience for ambiguity. “Nouvelle Vague” fixes that misconception with a wink—and then a jubilant kick in the shins. In Linklater’s hands, the breezy rebellion of the French New Wave becomes contagious, even necessary, reminding the 2025 audience that truly vital cinema doesn’t always play by the rules. After all, wouldn’t Godard have told us—if not in so many words—that the only reason to hold a camera is to upend whatever came before?

So, step inside the smoke, the racket, the crackle of celluloid and Broadway ghost-light. Ignore the velvet rope for once. Sometimes, the revolution waits at the far end of the edit bay—with the door propped open and a half-finished script on the table.

Somewhere in the haze between a pre-dawn espresso outside an Austin editing suite and the last swirl of cigarette smoke around a Parisian bistro, Richard Linklater has managed to stage his own quiet revolution—twice over, in fact. Hardly content to let the dust settle on a single artistic gamble, Linklater is drawing eyes from both industry purists and ticket-buying dreamers for a pair of films that, in their own ways, break things apart just to see where the pieces land.First, there’s “Nouvelle Vague,” a monochrome, madcap embrace of the wild-child genius that was Jean-Luc Godard. This isn’t some fussy homage, mind you—no glass cases, no whispered reverence. The film lurches and dances beneath curling smoke, a camera that’s as much an artifact as an accomplice, and a script that’s constantly threatening to spin off into glorious anarchy. Godard’s Paris wasn’t all existential sighs, nor was the French New Wave simply black turtlenecks and academic brooding. More often, it was an argument in a stairwell or four friends rioting through the city because, well, the rules had always been someone else’s problem.Linklater, that ever-irreverent Texan, doesn’t just pay tribute—he stages something closer to a séance. Filmed on the original aspect ratio, all sharp shadows and jazz-age daylight, “Nouvelle Vague” crackles with the kind of immediacy that studio nostalgia can never quite fake. The real coup here? He tracked down the legendary camera that once caught Belmondo’s impish grin in “Breathless,” now liberated from Raoul Coutard’s private archive. The response when they found it? “Does it still work?” Apparently, it does—beautifully. Cameras have long memories, it seems.The set was chaos—deliberately so. Actors sputtered in the face of improvisation, editors found themselves asked to forget everything they’d ever known about “continuity,” and somewhere in the tumult, Zoey Deutch seemed to molt from one persona into another. It’s rarely fair to toss around words like “chameleon” for actresses (Hollywood, for whatever reason, treats such shape-shifting as the territory of men), but here, Deutch claims it for herself. Her Seberg is mercurial, dazzling one moment, unexpectedly brittle the next, and always acutely aware of the camera—a performance that flirts with both the arrogance and the terror of youth.Meanwhile, Linklater’s other offering, “Blue Moon,” is cut from an altogether different fabric. The brisk, riotous energy of “Nouvelle Vague” yields to a quieter, almost surgical dissection of creative exhaustion. Ethan Hawke brings Larry Hart to life—or to the comfortless half-life of the late-career Broadway burnout—under Linklater’s unsparing gaze. Every gesture is measured and questioned; there’s a constant tension between performance and authenticity. The director’s demand? Less Ethan, more Larry; take away the swagger, even if it takes the air out of the room. Hawke, for his part, reportedly began to wonder if Linklater even liked his acting, only to be reminded, dryly and affectionately, that after nine films together, he might just be overthinking it.The release plan? Not much of a plan at all. There were jokes about “Use Your Illusion” double-albums, rumours of master strategies, but the truth, as often, is a happy accident. Both films, as it turns out, speak to beginnings—and endings—and perhaps, by a quirky logic, to Linklater’s own “Me and Orson Welles” as an unintentional third point in his trilogy about creative genesis and artistic twilight.What surfaces from all this—the sprinting through sunlit Paris streets, the hollow echo on a Broadway stage in winter’s dusk—is less a lesson in film history than a high-wire act. Linklater balances the faithfulness of a scholar with the mirth of a trickster, always one eye on the giants whose shoulders he stands on, the other on his own muddy boots.Some cling to the notion that “art films” are meant only for ascetics with infinite patience for ambiguity. “Nouvelle Vague” fixes that misconception with a wink—and then a jubilant kick in the shins. In Linklater’s hands, the breezy rebellion of the French New Wave becomes contagious, even necessary, reminding the 2025 audience that truly vital cinema doesn’t always play by the rules. After all, wouldn’t Godard have told us—if not in so many words—that the only reason to hold a camera is to upend whatever came before?So, step inside the smoke, the racket, the crackle of celluloid and Broadway ghost-light. Ignore the velvet rope for once. Sometimes, the revolution waits at the far end of the edit bay—with the door propped open and a half-finished script on the table.