Richard Linklater’s “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood” is the Texas film laureate’s latest rumination on our shared Tex-istence, a nostalgic feast for Houston-area baby boomers and Gen-Xers alike. Those born later aren’t left out, as there are plenty of Bayou City Easter eggs to delight us elderly millennials. Enjoying a limited theatrical release before moving to Netflix April 1, it’s a humid Houston hug of a movie.

Full disclosure: I have a very unique relationship with Linklater’s ’60s -themed animated adventure. Early in production, I helped Linklater’s crew crowdsource material from Houston’s Space Age through an article for the Houston Chronicle. I was even able to visit the set in Austin at Troublemaker Studios — just before COVID-19 scattered everyone into the wind — and watch Linklater at work.

杰克·布莱克是林克莱特担纲导演和制片人的成人阿凡达,enlisting a mischievous drawl (shades of Bernie Tiede) as he reminisces about his south Houston childhood for the audience, narrating life on the Gulf Coast plains in 1969. It’s set mainly in El Lago during the first decade of suburban sprawl, full of fresh asphalt, sparkling supermarkets, the occasional street flood, with the requisite water moccasin lurking in the deep. These kids build their forts from lumber pilfered from construction sites, the area trees much too young to hold a tree house.

We visit the Astrodome, AstroWorld across the street, the brown shores of Galveston Beach, the Texas Medical Center, and a certain orange-and-white burger joint even makes a brief cameo. There’s so much here for Houston natives to gaze at that you will likely find yourself pausing and rewinding multiple times. It’s like an Marvel Cinematic Universe movie for Houston history obsessives, and Linklater has packed almost every frame with something to catch your eye.

The film is bookended by fourth-grader Stan’s “fabulist” chronicle of being recruited by two smirking NASA guys in white shirts and black ties, played here by Glen Powell and Zachary Levi, to helm a kid-size Apollo mission to the moon, complete with a summer spent at space camp.

In the middle is a buffet of vivid, midcentury animation, punctuated by lively performances from the kid cast. The only way for Linklater to adequately capture the Space Age Houston he lived in was through the language of animation, echoing his own esoteric visual albums “A Scanner Darkly” and “Waking Life.” The animation style of Amsterdam’s World of Submarine visual production team repaints the Gulf Coast in vivid hues.

Linklater’s child avatar Stan, played by the moody Milo Cody, is a jaded Gen-Xer in training, bathing daily in pop culture, staring at a TV or his teachers when he’s not being subjected to treacherous astronaut training on the Vomit Comet, learning how to survive stranded in the wilderness, or braving the expanse of the lunar plains.

The adults that populate “Apollo 10½” are just as confounded by the changing times as the children are, stuck in the shadow of their Great Depression-scarred parents while their kids flirt with the counterculture. The family’s Admiral color TV set in the living room is their window to the world, where vicious Vietnam War and protest footage mingles with ’60s sitcoms and “The Johnny Cash Show.”

The civil unrest and racial tensions of the day are hinted at, clashing with the “triumph of the squares,” as one dissenting voice calls mankind’s costly lunar excursion. Hidden in plain sight is a love letter to the working-class families that made NASA hum during this period, from the stalwart shipping and receiving managers to the hotshot rocket scientists with slide rules in their hands.

Behind all the giddy Houston nostalgia, “Apollo 10½” is about the magic of the child imagination, as it teeters on the cusp of the teen years and the cynicism that comes with them. With “Apollo 10½,” Linklater invites us into his childhood for 97 minutes, and we ache with him for a time that was perhaps only simple on the surface.

Craig Hlavaty is a writer born and bred in Houston.