2025 has been the year for indie auteurs to be especially prolific. First Steven Soderbergh releases Presence and Black Bag in the first quarter of the year, and now Richard Linklater releases Nouvelle Vague less than a month after Blue Moon’s release. I was lucky enough to see Blue Moon in theaters a few weeks ago, and it is all but certain to make my best films of the year list come January, so I entered his second film of the year with high expectations.

Nouvelle Vague translates to New Wave which is an apt title for a film about the making of one of the defining French New Wave films: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Breathless came out in 1960, two years (or five if you count Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte) into the French New Wave movement. While Godard’s debut was not the beginning of the movement, it was a step to the more radical and revolutionary side of the movement, so it does make sense to signal the film out.

Unfortunately, while Breathless is a groundbreaking, convention shattering piece of cinema, Linklater did not have similarly lofty goals for his fictional behind-the-scenes telling of its creation. Linklater is a student of film and as such has a lot of reverence for the film, but other than paying his respects to the late Godard does not have much to say in Nouvelle Vague. He casts the Cahiers du Cinéma writers and future filmmakers as the cool outsiders who disrespect the current film industry because they know what art should be. History, and I, agree with that sentiment in hindsight, but it does not stop the characters of Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Chabrol (Antoine Besson), and Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest) from coming across as unbearably pompous.

Marbeck’s depicts Godard as such an unlikable cad which does match my understanding of the director himself, but it also becomes grating as the film continues with him in every scene constantly talking. The only truly likable character in the film is Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), and while Deutch is excellent Linklater portrays her as naïve and unable to understand the genius that is Godard. Linklater wants the viewer to know that Godard was a genius who changed cinema for the better, and he is not wrong that Godard’s creations are that impressive and important. I am just done with aggrandizing arrogant men who think themselves a god. Instead, I choose to celebrate the work while acknowledging that creators can be flawed.