Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

The hero and narrator of “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood” is a fourth-grader named Stan (Jack Black voices him as an adult). The number in the title refers to Stan’s age, which is also the grade he is in at school. He lives in suburban Houston. It’s the summer before Apollo 11 lifts off for the moon, and two mysterious G-men have just recruited him from the playground essentially making him a proto-astronaut.

It’s all patently ridiculous on its face, but Richard Linklater owns that. The story of “Apollo 10 1/2” is told with deadpan conviction, an awfully big twinkle in its eye and a tone that except for a few moments of cloying whimsy stays admirably dry as well as visually confident (animation seems to sharpen his compositions; this is much more “realistic,” style-wise, than his earlier efforts “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly”).

Whether kids the age of Linklater’s hero will have much to hold their attention after the prologue depends on how they feel about movies that are one long reminiscence about America in the late ’60s specifically Texas’ biggest city-suburb, swimming in cash and national attention thanks to NASA being based there. Virtually everything you see is narrated by grown-up Jack Black, and there are stretches where you might think you’re watching a very gracefully edited slide show with moving pictures; it feels less like cinema than words with pictures mostly serving them.

Stan’s mind wanders constantly, and what we’re really watching are moments or bits of memory from within a scattered grown man who hasn’t entirely left childhood behind yet whose personal experience has fused with pop culture consumed (everything from TV’s “Dark Shadows” to Dick Cavett interviewing Janis Joplin to Robert Altman’s space adventure “Countdown” to the ascendant, Joe Namath-led New York Jets).

There are also thankfully nods to what was happening in the parts of America that cared more about things other than the space race than they did about what was happening in their neighborhoods and homes from the fear of losing young men not much older than Stan in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, to the realization that if the federal government was going to spend billions to land white men on the moon and show up the Soviets when poverty and discrimination were still allowed to fester down here, maybe there were better uses for Juicy Fruit wrappers.

The movie never gets too far beyond those bubbles of consciousness. It doesn’t exactly end with a bang. It’s not even something you finish and go, “I hoped that would never end.” Ninety minutes plus change is plenty for a film like this; it knows it’s a personal essay type of deal. But Stan is an eminently likable storyteller, and there is always room, at a time when Hollywood could care less about any idea not based on some kind of preexisting property or franchise starter kit, for small movies about big things especially if they don’t take you where you think you want to go but instead bring you inside someone else’s head where perception is limited by experience but only filtered through curiosity.

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