• Netflix

Nostalgia, as the saying goes, is a hell of a drug—and one that the American film and television industry is addicted to. From reboots of vintage TV shows to "legacy-quels" like Scream and Spider-man: No Way Home that cash in on affection for long-lived franchises, creators seem to know easy money comes not from creating new happy memories, but reminding you of the happy memories you have from 10, 20 or 30 years ago. It's the narrative equivalent of a band at a concert shouting out the name of the city they're playing in—enthusiasm you don't have to work hard to inspire.

At first glance, Richard Linklater's Apollo 10-1/2: A Space Age Childhood doesn't seem like it belongs in the same category. It's an original story, and a personal one, based largely on the filmmaker's own youth. The filmmaking style is distinctive, applying the same computer-animated versions of filmed performances that Linklater previously employed in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. Yet while there are charming moments of specificity in Linklater's narrative, it also leans way too heavily on throwing out a bunch of touchstones for a late '60s white suburban American childhood. If you're a demographic-target audience member who will smile and nod at every reference, he's got you in his back pocket; if not, is there much of a reason for you to watch?

The time frame in this case is quite specifically 1969, when Linklater's stand-in, Stan (Milo Coy) is in the fourth grade in a suburb of Houston, Texas, where his dad (Bill Wise) works in an administrative capacity for NASA. Narrated from a 50-year remove by an older Stan (Jack Black), it begins with the fanciful notion that Stanley has been recruited by a pair of government employees (Zachary Levi and Glen Powell) to take a trial trip to the moon ahead of the planned landmark event, as the original capsule was accidentally manufactured too small for a full-grown adult.

That's a fun little idea—a kid's-eye-view of a historic moment as applying quite specifically to him—and Linklater gets back to it eventually. But pretty much as soon as the subject is raised, the story backtracks to setting up Stanley's family life as the youngest of six children, and the various activities that would make up his daily routine. The vibe is similar to that of other reminiscence-based tales like A Christmas Story or The Sandlot, with episodic adventures and moments of amusement, yet to say that Apollo 10-1/2's chronicling of the era's pastimes was "comprehensive" would be a gross understatement. Instead of showing Stan and his siblings watching TV shows, Linklater literally fills the screen with title cards from that year's most popular programs; board games similarly get a how-many-names-can-you-drop treatment. Most romanticized tales of this kind at least allow time for their individual recollections to build to a satisfying resolution. It often seems like Linklater has so many items on his checklist of things to tell us about that every anecdote ends after about a minute and a half.

It also doesn't help that he's exploring one of the most overly-navel-gazed-at eras in American history. There is some interest in looking at that time of social upheaval from the perspective of a white kid who barely understood what the Vietnam War and civil rights movements were, but it still means a parade of played-out needle-drops by The Byrds, Credence Clearwater Revival, The 5th Dimension and others. On the occasions where Linklater tunes into something more particular—like Stan being out driving with his mom (Lee Eddy), and asking for help identifying hippies in the wild—Apollo 10-1/2 actually finds its own voice, separate from "the '60s were a very turbulent time."

There is eventually more time spent on Stan's "NASA training," which is in part a manifestation of his wish that his Dad's NASA job were cooler than mere paper-pushing. It might have been helpful to explore more of that relationship, or any of those relationships, rather than spending that time nudging us about how back then, you had to adjust your TV's rabbit-ear antennae to get good reception. Neither the stylized animation nor the story's content do enough to make Stan's story Stan's story, rather than an avatar for "person of an age to remember the moon landing." Linklater injects the nostalgia directly into your veins, waiting for the endorphin rush that comes from "remember that?"