There are at least two Richard Linklaters: the filmmaker who emerged in 1991 with Slacker, offering two more like-minded works which we’ll refer to as the “walkers and/or talkers” (Before Sunrise, Waking Life) and the one who, with the exception of Tape, has produced a handful of classical narratives (Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia, The Newton Boys, School of Rock) which contain comedic elements, but prove difficult to define simply as genre comedies proper. He’s funny, we know that. But the debate rages on: Do his films, particularly the aforementioned walking and/or talking trio, define Linklater as a concerned cultural critic or confused (stoned) cinematic (super-8) quack (slacker)?

Indifference is rare—this polarizing dispute has spawned LinkLovers and LinkLoathers, two camps grasping for clear-cut signals amidst the fog of confounding mutability this tightrope-walking filmmaker so obviously relishes. Though to us ‘Loathers, the conventional Linklater never seemed much more than a droll writer/director-for-hire, the foundation of our rancorous discontent was cemented by Slacker, Before Sunrise, and Waking Life. Personally, these walkers and/or talkers have so colored my vision with their exhausting, desperately sophomoric pseudo-intellectual drivel, that I imagined their author one of those ubiquitous acquaintances—for we’ve all got at least one—who has “ideas, man, about what’s wrong with our generation” and wants to make (insert indie-smash here) meets (slept-through Bergman title here), where the characters actually, like, ask the bigquestions.” My personal Linklater sobriquet, has always been simple, dismissive, and italicized—“Oh yeah, right, that guy.” By 1995 all traces of Linklater’s self-effacing spark, faint-but-there in Ethan Hawke’s roll-with-the-cosmic-punches Jesse in Before Sunrise, seemed burnt-out. The question became: are the glorified Linklater/slacker alter-egos exhaustively, unremarkably, figuring themselves out onscreen, on our time and dime, or are they something else entirely, loveable losers-under-a-microscope to be chuckled at, not with?

Well, I hate to admit defeat, so instead I’ll offer the following: Come summer, the ‘Loathers are going to start dwindling. I’ve seen his latest film and I think—strike that—I have been converted and I don’t know how to deal with it. It’s all really quite simple. That guy so inclined to chat your ear off, the one who got his hands on a camera and actually made those stoner movies, has evidently grown up.

With the release of Before Sunset, Linklater and what may or may not be his aging alter-ego emerge beautifully as keen observationists, still jabbering about life, love, and the big questions, but in a refined and immeasurably more affecting manner. Things change. (I left this epiphanic sequel with tear-stained cheeks.) Well, some things. It has been nearly a decade since Before Sunrise, but Hawke as Jesse, the preternaturally gifted Julie Delpy as Cèline, and Linklater as their walking-tour guide through a gorgeous European city—that’s all the same. When we last left these two, they’d spent a magical evening together enacting the kind of fairy tale that gooey Seventeen dreams are made of. Parting wistfully at the train station, they agreed with typical crossmyheartandhopetodie caprice to meet at that very spot, one year later. Turns out Jesse showed, but in a twist of how-to-make-the-sequel-work fate, Cèline was attending her grandmother’s funeral. So it’s at Jesse’s Paris book reading that their aged-faces enter the same frame again, marked irrevocably by the imprint of time, an impossibly effective real-life literalization of the subject Sunset so exquisitely explores.

Though it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sight of these star-crossed lovers face to face again begets sparks, I’m not sure there’s a film in the last decade which serves up such an astonishingly electric display of that over-employed term referring to a rarely realized feat: chemistry. Delpy and Hawke slide into their respective roles with such grace it’s as if they’d never fully cast off their Jesse/Cèline integuments. That they also receive co-writing credits this time around, may have something to do with the fact that they’ve never played more magnetically than through these skins, mapping the vicissitudes of these lives, conversing in such a strangely paradoxical manner marked by a precisely tuned state of nervous ease. In those first moments of contact, when the memory of who each was morphs into the reality of who each is, eyes speak nine years worth of longing as they seek comfort in gauging the other’s wins and losses writ large in a wrinkle, a pock on a pretty visage that mirrors their (and our) own. In the ensuing 70-something minutes, that chasm of time is filled with stories, memories, and those haunting what ifs. Here, Linklater crafts himself a narrative through which he explores a philosophy of reflection rather than conjecture, a perspective on time with which he too seems finally at home.

Complimenting the fusion of audience, subjects, and subject matter, DP Lee Daniel’s taut maintenance of intimacy-through-proximity is an especially refreshing vision when set against the backdrop of today’s carnivalesque spectaculars raising tent poles even in our arthouses. But the visual stratagem succeeds in large part because of the simple fact that Linlakater and Co. make their audience want to be that close; this breathtaking ode to love, fate, and intimacy supplants the inexpiable off-broadway midden of ’95 with immersive and passionate scripting predicated on the power of unfulfilled desire in these characters and their audience alike. After all these years, we too desire Jesse as Cèline does, and Cèline like Jesse, romantic to romantic to romantic in search of that singular unified romance in life, in this day of cinema diffused.

Maybe some of this adulation is reactive residue. Maybe some of it has to due with the simple fact that I’m so tired of hearing about Quentin Tarantino’s infallible genius, his soulless opus’s one and two, that I’m eager to divert attention to what some might call the anti-Bill. But if any one American work had the chance to sneak out from beneath the shadow of Uma’s formidable juggernauts and instill some sense of raw spirit this inevitably blockbustered-to-bits summer, Sunset is the film. Linklater and a couple of actor-friends have utterly outdone themselves here, realizing the nascent maturation signaled surprisingly by last year’s School of Rock, in all its sublime majesty.

So, who the hell is Richard Linklater? A reformed slacker? An evolving American auteur? Director of the best date-movie couplet ever? Let the debates begin. To offer a trite but appropriate answer to all such inquiries: if he can pull off the kind of earnest in-your-face romance he does here, who cares anymore? As of July, the only way to describe Richard Linklater “in a class by himself.” Well, in this country, anyway.