Richard Linklater believes in obsession. He’s talked about his ravenous consumption of cinema when he was working his way up to being a director, and he’s offered blunt assessments about film students who don’t similarly engage with other people’s creations. “And I’m like, ‘You wanna make films? You’re not gonna make it. I can tell you right now. Go do something else,'” Linklater said to a film festival audience. “Because you don’t love movies enough, you just think movies are fun. You can’t expect anything but what you give it.” That background helps explain why Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, is so extraordinary. Godard (played here by Guillaume Marbeck) was a fiercely devoted film connoisseur when he followed several of his Cahiers du Cinéma cohorts the other side of the camera to first craft a work for the big screen. Linklater clearly understands the edgy passion of this artistic predecessor. Nouvelle Vague plays like a procedural as it delves into the improvisational mechanics Godard brought to the production. Linklater is fully engaged by Godard’s complexity as the first-time director proves ingenious and aggravating in equal measure. Befitting a movie about the transformative deconstructionism of a whole generation of French filmmakers, Linklater is rascally in his approach. In the most striking example, he introduces famed figures by having them stolidly stare straight into the camera as they’re identified with text onscreen. The goal of Nouvelle Vague is to meet all these towering predecessors on their own terms and deeply understand their inspiration. Linklater loves movies enough to not just reach that goal but to absolutely nails it.