If being locked in the Criterion Closet for a couple of hours sounds like heaven, Richard Linklater has made the perfect film for you. It’s a playful, black-and-white making-of story for Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic Breathless – ‘À Bout de Souffle’ to the cinephile crowd – that captures a revolutionary moment in cinema history with reverence and a touch of cheek.

You’ll probably know movies that backdrop the story: Godard’s 1960 crime drama Breathless is the key text, of course, but Truffaut’s Cannes premiere of The 400 Blows is also recreated with a wink to contemporary Cannes-goers, and Linklater offers access-all-areas visits to the sets of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket and Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic noir Bob le Flambeur too.

But chronology is king here. When he’s introduced, coolly intellectual behind his ever-present shades, Godard (played with distracted charisma by Parisian photographer Guillaume Marbeck) has yet to put someone else’s money where his sizeable mouth is. The French New Wave has begun and his fellow critics at film mag Cahiers du Cinéma, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and his best pal François Truffaut, have begun to establish themselves as filmmakers. Godard is in danger of being left behind, a kind of chic troll snarking from the sidelines.

But as Godard famously said, all you need to make a film is a gun and a girl. His opportunity comes via the sponsorship of his soon-to-be long-suffering producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). Breathless, of course, features both gun and girl: newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo’s hard-bitten but boyish outlaw has the former; pixie-cropped Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg is the effervescent American newspaper vendor he sweeps up in his wake. 

It’ll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll

Linklater cleverly homages Godard’s style with handheld cameras, unsynced sound, choppy editing and scratchy celluloid, all framed in the same boxy 1:37 aspect ratio as Breathless. His cast of first-timers is impressive, too. Aubry Dullin is fabulous as Belmondo, the angelic ex-boxer whose guilelessness lends his bandit a disarming quality. And like Godard, Linklater casts a more established actor, Zoey Deutch (Everybody Wants Some!!), in the Seberg role. It may be a facsimile of the original stars’ on-screen chemistry, but there’s real spark as the pair try to cope with their director’s abstractions and loathing of scripted dialogue. 

There is, of course, a script behind all this – a warm and witty one by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo – as well as filming permits and financing and all the things that Godard was railing against when he made Breathless. Maybe that’s why Nouveau Vague lacks the same anarchic urgency as the film it’s homaging, and why in Linklater’s filmography, Boyhood might be the film with more ‘Godard’ in it.

But for devoted filmlovers, Nouvelle Vague is a must-see – a joyful homage to the art of cinema that’ll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll.

Nouvelle Vague premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.