Second Take: ‘Boyhood’ defines millennial generation’s adolescent experience

I think in our hypermodern yet retro-obsessed world, the phrase “I wish I was born in another era” gets thrown around a lot, mostly as an open rejection of popular culture. I mean why shouldn’t it?

The ’60s had Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan. The ’80s had the Smiths. Artists who grab onto and capture, on their canvas, a fleeting period of time, place and emotion that would have otherwise floated away into obscurity.

But we can finally throw away the silly “You know you’re a ’90s kid if …” BuzzFeed quizzes because millennials finally have a masterpiece we can call our own – one we can cherish as uniquely ours, nobody else’s. It comes in the form of a film that refuses to define our generation by Facebook, Snapchat and selfies, and instead works to find, through its lens, the misunderstood story of our unique adolescence.

“Boyhood,” written and directed by Richard Linklater, follows Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) and his family: elder sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and divorced parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) through more than a decade of their lives. Furiously dedicated to capturing the story of growing up through the 2000s, the film is composed of a series of vignettes filmed real-time over 12 years, with its writing, directing and characters’ growing, developing and occasionally stumbling along the way.

Sitting in your theater seat, it’s a little surreal – no, downright bizarre – to see so much of your life transpire in front of you.

There you are, right next to Mason outside in the chilly night with a scar painted over your head, waiting to get your copy of the newest Harry Potter book. And the subsequent wrestling match with your sibling over who gets the first crack at it.

It can be embarrassing, saddening and heartwarming – the same rush of confused vigor you get flipping through an old, dusty photo album, looking at a you that you barely even recognize anymore. “Boyhood” is your first elementary school sleepover, the baggy pants phase you worked so hard to forget, your first pair of skinny jeans, your first song on your 2004 iPod Classic and your first kiss.

But on top of these nostalgic artifacts, “Boyhood” digs at something deeper. It picks apart with surgical precision the spellbinding moments that are so individual, but somehow universal among us.

It manages to peer in at your 3 a.m. conversation with your best friend in the local diner a few weeks before graduation, contemplating life and the future and high order philosophy over a late-night burger. And at that cathartic road trip with your dad where you finally see him not as a parent but as a person, as he forces you to listen to “the good old classics,” which suddenly aren’t so bad. It unravels some of the most confusing advice we’ve gotten growing up: “Be responsible,” “Act like an adult,” and “Think long and hard over the person you want to become.”

Identity is always a struggle, but “Boyhood” helps us find the bits of us, forgotten through time, that make us who we are.

And there’s something magical about the reality of it all.

Movies, following the path of literature, music and art, have for the most part been an adventure to pull us away from reality, into worlds far away. “Boyhood” turns back, choosing to open our eyes to just how thrilling our own reality has been, walking us through it one more savory time.

Honestly, it’s a little depressing to hear over and over the characterization we’ve been conditioned to, as a generation defined by the technology and the superficiality we’ve been known to consume.

But maybe we can finally say no, we’re about something more meaningful, more universal than that. Maybe we’re ready to look back and say we’ve traveled the same journey to adulthood as every generation before; we’ve just gone about it a bit differently. Now with “Boyhood,” we finally have proof — about 12 years’ worth.