Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg in 'Nouvelle Vague'Image via Netflix
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Thomas Butt
Published 2 hours ago
Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.
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Any black-and-white movie about the making of a French New Wave film doesn't attract much commercial interest, which explains why Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater's loose account of the making of Breathless and the emergence of Jean-Luc Godard, is receiving a bare minimum theatrical release by Netflix. To its credit, Netflix will at least give esteemed filmmakers considerable money to realize un-commercial projects. The film is catnip for hardcore cinephiles, as Godard and the French New Wave are North Stars for budding film buffs and filmmakers alike. While it doesn't have the broadest appeal, the final product surprisingly offers a solid solution to problems of one of our most tired subgenres: the biopic.
Rather than serving as a cinematic history lesson, Nouvelle Vague shines as a Linklater-approved hangout comedy, akin to Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!! In an ingenious move, Linklater does not chronicle Godard's entire life or recount every moment of Breathless' production. Biopics, especially those of the music variety, should take notes and create an immersive world, letting your subjects become characters.
'Nouvelle Vague' Portrays a Specific Period in Jean-Luc Godard's Life
Richard Linklater's 2025 features a double-billing of films about gifted artists at polar opposites in their careers, with Nouvelle Vague capturing the vibrant dawn of a wunderkind talent, while Blue Moon is an elegiac swan song of Lorenz Hart's career as a lyricist. Linklater is no stranger to tracking the methodical evolution of people, taking 12 years to direct the grandest coming-of-age story of all in Boyhood and returning to a romantic relationship across three decades in the Before trilogy. Biopics about storied and esteemed historical figures like to do the same within the compressed timeframe of one motion picture, leading to rushed and dramatically inert films that have become the butt of jokes, notably in parody form in Walk Hard: A Dewey Cox Story.
Still, the recent release of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere shows that this subgenre isn't going anywhere. The film, starring Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen, had the right idea of condensing the timeframe to the musician's writing of the album, Nebraska, but it felt obligated to act as a Wikipedia summary. Nouvelle Vague perfects this formula by constraining the narrative within the confines of Godard's unorthodox production of Breathless. Unlike the overstuffed cradle-to-grave biopics that attempt to tell a cohesive story about an artist's entire life, Linklater throws audiences right in the middle of Godard's life as a critic for Cahiers du cinema and never alludes to the profound influence that he would leave on a whole generation of filmmakers. Linklater resists the urge to drop Easter eggs for cinephiles to spot, such as Godard's follow-up movies like Vivre sa vie and Contempt.
Richard Linklater Captured the Spirit of the French New Wave in 'Nouvelle Vague'
The youthful spirit was essential to the fabric of the Nouvelle Vague, so tracking Godard as he aged and grew more disillusioned with the state of cinema would undermine the film's innate charm. The issue with countless biopics is that they devolve into dour tropes once they reach an artist's personal and professional nadirs, losing all the unique charm that made them special. More so than mirroring the visual style of the era, Linklater imbued the spirit of the French New Wave.
A French-language movie about arthouse cinema is hardly an experiment for Richard Linklater, an avid cinephile with versatile taste. From afar, the premise of Nouvelle Vague seems academic, but Linklater allows the film to sprout by doing what he does best: craft a period ensemble hangout comedy. One would be hard-pressed to find much difference between the French critics and filmmakers ribbing each other and roaming the streets of Paris and the party-loving teens in Dazed and Confused kicking off their summer. Linklater understands the freewheeling artistic spirit of this era by making the milieu fully tactile and invigorating for the audience. You could hang out with Godard and François Truffaut all day as they discuss film theory and their love for Hollywood noirs.
The best thing you could say about Nouvelle Vague is that you don't have to be educated in the world of French cinema to enjoy the film. While a contextual understanding of its cultural significance enhances the dramatic stakes of the film, Richard Linklater's focus on turning Jean-Luc Godard into a character into a contained story appeals to the non-cinephile crowd. For those who know Breathless by heart, you're never thinking about Nouvelle Vague's historical implications. Instead, the Godard character is seamlessly stripped down to being just an underdog with a dream.
In most biopics, with the music variety being the most glaring culprit, the narrative feels perfunctory, and the artificial reenactment of a subject's life reads as a soulless play to boost album sales. We don't need to be informed of everything that has occurred in a figure's life—we have the Internet for that. Biopic subjects deserve a unique story or interpretation of their work.
Nouvelle Vague is now available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
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Nouvelle Vague
Like Follow Followed Comedy Drama History Release Date October 31, 2025 Runtime 105 Minutes Director Richard Linklater Writers Holly Gent, Laetitia Masson, Michèle Pétin, Vincent Palmo Jr. Producers Laurent PétinCast
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Guillaume Marbeck
Jean-Luc Godard
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Zoey Deutch
Jean Seberg
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Nouvelle Vague
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