Our teenage years exist as a series of fleeting moments, consistently thrown out and renewed by external forces such as parental pressure or societal norms.

Everything happens in a uniquely quick fashion and it’s over in a blink of an eye. We rarely get a chance to, or have the wherewithal to, step back and analyze our adolescent emotions and what it truly means to be a kid. This idea was explored in “Boyhood,” a film about a young boy (Mason) who, over a 12-year period, becomes a man before our eyes.

Young life is a precarious experience. If we’re like some, we become familiar with a group of people and we learn and grow through that familiarity. If we’re like most, we’re introduced to strange groups of people and constantly forced to grow through new experiences and unfamiliar territory.

Mason (Ellar Coltrane) is the son of a single mother (Patricia Arquette). He is forced to move to a different city, is raised by two drunken father-figures, and goes through a substantial high school breakup.

In a normal script, this sort of backstory would accompany a senseless killer or a ruthless lawyer who overcame the odds. But part of “Boyhood’s” greatness is that it’s unafraid to be real. It simply exists. Its clunky camera movements and lack of any sort of cinematic eye point to a film of observation. We don’t see Mason’s “life-changing” events immediately change his life; we watch them slowly dictate who he becomes.

Mason’s father, played by Ethan Hawke (a fixture in most of director Richard Linklater’s films), is a staunch Democrat, and makes his objections to the Bush regime well-known throughout the early years of the film. There is a particularly humorous scene in which Mason and his sister (Lorelei Linklater) are enlisted by their father to place Obama/Biden banners in yards and snatch up McCain/Palin banners as an act of “patriotism.”

As the years progress, we begin to see how his father’s mannerisms become his mannerisms, and we see how much Mason soaked up in the limited time he spent with his father.

This is a film that needs to be seen. The two hour and 45 minute runtime seems daunting, but when the well of satisfying nostalgia runs dry, there’s a healthy dose of the analytical dialogue that make Linklater’s films special.

4/4 stars.

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