The French New Wave gets a fresh coat of paint with "Nouvelle Vague," director Richard Linklater's lovely and loving tribute to the revolutionary film movement and the making of Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless."

Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard as a peerlessly cool, misfit rebel artist who sees the world from behind the lenses of his black wayfarer shades, which never leave his face. He assembles a group of actors and crew members to shoot his masterpiece in the streets of Paris, on the fly, and never more than two takes, causing everyone around him to panic about his perceived carelessness and the idea that he doesn't know what it is he's doing.

Among those in his orbit are François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Éric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) and Agnès Varda (Roxane Rivière), pillars of the burgeoning French New Wave. Zoey Deutch is Jean Seberg, the American actress thrust into the scene, wondering if she's throwing away her life on the whims of the young filmmaker, who was just 30 at the time of "Breathless'" filming.

Linklater, working from a script by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo, employs a light, loose comic tone throughout and captures the youthful energy of the scene, which thumbed its nose at the traditions and conventions of film at the time. It is shot by David Chambille in crisp black and white, emblematic of the era of film it's depicting, and Marbeck's Godard is a warrior for truth, constantly tossing out quotable nuggets ("all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun," he declares, as if from the heavens) like a scholar of the screen.

Further, "Nouvelle Vague" is inviting rather than exclusionary, down-to-earth rather than pretentious. It's a romp for film fans that celebrates the notion that cinema can change the world, 24 frames per second at a time.

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'NOUVELLE VAGUE'

Grade: B+

MPA rating: R (for some language)

Running time: 1:46

How to watch: Netflix

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