Review: ‘Dream Is Destiny’ appreciates filmmaker Richard Linklater’s creative process

From “Slacker” to “Boyhood,” filmmaker Richard Linklater offered an expansive, considerate and ruminative view of life’s great walkabout that has won many fans and made him cinema’s foremost wandering poet. It’s not surprising to find, then, in the voluminous behind-the-scenes footage from the documentary “Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny,” that on set he comes across more like a gatherer than a hunter, as if making a film isn’t about slaying some beast but harvesting the small riches in one’s environment.

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This isn’t the first documentary on Linklater — just recently we saw the release of “21 Years: Richard Linklater.” But unlike that film’s hagiographic sloppiness, “Dream Is Destiny” directors Louis Black (a co-founder with Linklater of the Austin Film Society) and Karen Bernstein do well to give illuminative artistic context to their obvious admiration.

Interviews with the usual suspects — Ethan Hawke, Matthew McConaughey, Patricia Arquette — are judiciously deployed. But the real gold is in giving plenty of voice to Linklater himself, since the Texas-based director not only enjoys revisiting his artistic progress (including hauling out journals to show), but is wonderfully articulate about how he’s processed each signpost along his career, from the lightning-in-a-bottle indie phenom that was “Slacker” through the unlikely “Before” franchise of walk-and-talk romanticism to “Boyhood,” an idea dreamed in minutes and brilliantly realized over 12 years. Considering its subject often enjoys the simple wonder inherent in characters who look into the distance, “Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny” does an extra-fine job of looking back with similarly rich and appreciative curiosity.

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‘Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny’

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall