Nothing scares Richard Linklater more than universal adulation. The maverick director has a theory that if everybody loves something—we’re thinking McDonald’s, Green Day, John Grisham—you’re better off avoiding it. “If everyone likes a movie,” he says, “there’s usually something kind of lame about it.” So when Boyhood, the $4 million cinematic experiment that had occupied 12 years of his life, debuted to rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival almost exactly a year ago, it sort of wigged him out. But as he considered the positive responses—and talked to audience members—he noticed something strange. Lots of people liked it, but rarely for the same reasons. “Everyone was having a similar experience but a very different one based on his or her own life,” he says. “‘Oh, I had an a- -hole stepfather.’ ‘Oh, I have an older sibling.’ ‘Oh, my parents are divorced.’ People were glomming on to such different things while moving through the movie that it made me feel better. It was so personal to everyone.”

Now this little Rorschach test of a film, which tracks the progression of one boy’s childhood from first grade through his first day of college, has grown up itself. Released far from the autumn Oscar-movie months, on July 11—and now available on DVD and download—this summer indie sleeper has grossed more than $43 million worldwide and has matured into a confident young Oscar contender.

By any measure, that never should have happened. Boyhood eschews all the rules of filmmaking and ignores almost every Hollywood convention: It doesn’t feature megawatt stars, it rips apart the traditional three-act structure, and its most dramatic moments (hints of domestic violence, shoving in a school bathroom) would be mere footnotes in any other film. That sheer rebelliousness has secured Boyhood a spot in the Best Picture race—a level of recognition galaxies beyond what anyone involved with the film could have hoped for. But that’s not the end of the story, because this movie, a movie that no major studio executive in her right mind would have greenlit, a movie unlike any ever made, has now become this season’s quiet front-runner.

The idea for Boyhood first came to Linklater in the summer of 2001. He was searching for a way to make a movie about childhood but was struggling to isolate one moment that defines it. Throughout his career, he’d been drawn to slice-of-life narratives with little plot or structure. That very year he released two films that pushed up against the idea of what film should be: the rotoscope-animated philosophical drama Waking Life and Tape, which featured three friends in a single motel room, talking. He preferred to work outside the studio system from his hometown of Austin, and although his Dazed and Confused had evolved into a cult classic, he’d never had a box office hit. (Even now, his highest grossing film, by far, is 2003’s School of Rock, which earned $81 million in the U.S.) He didn’t seem to mind. He followed up School of Rock with a sequel to his one-night romance Before Sunrise, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. (It would eventually become a trilogy, following the same two characters for 18 years.) “A lot of Rick’s movies have these funny, very simple ideas,” Ethan Hawke says. “‘I want to make a movie about riding a EuroRail and meeting a girl on a train.’ ‘I want to make a movie about high school graduation.’ It’s just his commitment to the idea that becomes so powerful.”

That summer of 2001, the simple idea of childhood was powerful in Linklater’s life. He’d grown up a child of divorce, moving around a lot, and was then still a relatively new father. Boyhood, he says now, “became a 12-year journey about coming to grips with my own childhood, while also understanding parenting.” So he decided to catalog the entirety of childhood, shooting with the same actors a few days a year for 12 years. He asked Hawke and Patricia Arquette to play the divorced parents and cast his own 7-year-old daughter, Lorelei, as the older sister. “I just thought it was brilliant, and I kinda couldn’t believe that somebody had not already done this,” Hawke says. Linklater’s biggest roll of the dice, though, was finding his Mason, the boy of Boyhood. He hired an untested 6-year-old, Ellar Coltrane, an unactorly sort with two artist parents and a strong sense of self. “He didn’t give a s- - - what you thought of him, which was refreshing,” Linklater remembers. “He could be very natural.”

When filming began in 2002, in a house in north Austin, the Academy Awards were the furthest thing from Linklater’s mind. He was worried about the usual things—his actors’ connections to one another and the material, the framing in each scene—but first and foremost he needed to make sure he could keep this grand experiment going for 12 years. He had found an eager partner in Jonathan Sehring, president of the indie production company IFC, who had agreed to hand Linklater about $200,000 each year to reunite the cast and crew. The rest of the budget, including almost $1 million in music rights, went to postproduction. (In 2012, when IFC needed to postpone payment until the following calendar year, Linklater, whose house had burned down in fall 2011, used his insurance check to pay for filming until IFC could pay him back.)

Not even that financial backing, however, could guarantee him that his actors wouldn’t bail somewhere down the line.

Contracts for personal services like acting are generally only valid for seven years, so the entire endeavor would have to be based on trust. “This whole thing was just a handshake deal,” Hawke says. “I would fly down to Texas every so often—sometimes nine months later, sometimes 16 months later. It was always catch-as-catch-can as Rick would get the next piece of the quilt ready. Oftentimes I’d stay at his house and we’d rehearse and conceive the next chapter.”

On Jan. 7, the night before the Academy’s nomination ballots were due, a handful of celebrity heavyweights, including Diane Keaton, Jack Black, and producer Frank Marshall, hosted a packed crowd honoring Boyhood at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. One 91-year-old Academy member told Linklater he “drove a long way” just to meet him and Coltrane. Keaton, dressed in a three-piece tweed suit, said she’d never hosted an event for a film she wasn’t involved in. “I’m here because I think you have to support things you love,” she said.

In the wake of its Golden Globes win, the paradox facing Boyhood now is that it is both the front-runner and the underdog in the race for Best Picture. Its brash originality is working both for it and against it in the eyes of some voters. It lacks the visual scale and grandeur of a traditional Oscar movie, like The Imitation Game or American Sniper. On the other end, it’s competing with the high-wire act of Birdman, another nontraditional Oscar contender filled with its rat-a-tat energy and meta-commentary on the entertainment industry. “It’s a very solid pack of films, but none tower,” says one Oscar voter. “Boyhood stands out, but I am still stuck on whether I am rewarding a great gimmick or great filmmaking or maybe a bit of both.” The goal of that event with Keaton and gang—and of what are sure to be many like it to follow—is to elevate Boyhood to the level of “important film,” and imbue it with the kind of gravitas that makes Academy members feel comfortable declaring it the best film of the year.

If it wins, it will be because it appeals to both the hearts and the minds of Academy members. Boyhood, in the end, is a feat that requires you to check your cynicism at the door—something many Academy members, who fight every day in a fickle, stingy business, wish they could do more. It has already had that effect on the actor who, after eight films, has worked with Linklater more than any other. At 44, Hawke has been starring in films for three decades, and over his career he has seen every side of Hollywood, from the brutal to the sublime. Or rather, he thought he had. “I’ve watched a lot of directors with brilliant harebrained schemes go down in flames,” he says. “And just when I was about to admit defeat, thinking it’s impossible to break through the system, Rick made this film. IFC released it and audiences supported it. It’s just knocked all my jadedness to the ground.”