Boyhood ─ A Young Life on Screen

This book traces the development of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood from its audacious concept through its tenacious production to its celebrated reception, placing it within the context of cinematic parables about children to demonstrate its distinctive vision. Timothy Shary, author of numerous studies on the history of teen cinema, evaluates the film’s many messages about youth and adolescence within the context of early twenty-first century American culture, illuminating how Linklater’s singular vision of the otherwise ordinary life of a boy reveals potent universal truths about all people.

Timothy Shary has published seven books on the representational politics of age and gender, beginning with Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (2002; 2014), and most recently Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema (2016) with Nancy McVittie. His work on youth cinema has been published in numerous books and journals since the 1990s, including The Journal of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Culture, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Boyhood Studies.