Director Richard Linklater is a dab hand at playing with time.

His "before" trilogy of Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight followed the development of a love affair over 18 years of real time, his characters played each time by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, whose ageing and own life experiences added to the veracity of the work.

With his new film, which was 12 years in the making, Linklater has moved to an even more ambitious level, creating something that is at once intimate and epic, specific and universal, in two hours and 40 minutes of seamless and immersive storytelling.

Shot between 2002 and 2013, Boyhood follows the life of Mason from six to 18 years of age; Linklater shot for a few days of every one of those 18 years, writing and editing along the way with his collaborator Sandra Adair. The result is a fiction that has the resonance of reality, as Mason grows from a boy to a young man before our eyes.

The film follows the boy (Ellar Coltrane), his slightly older sister Samantha (the director's own daughter, Lorelei Linklater) and single mum Olivia (Patricia Arquette) in their travels around Texas, as Olivia pursues love and career with one thing uppermost in her mind: making the best life possible for her children.

Olivia will marry and remarry, the kids will experience stepfathers and step-siblings, new schools, new towns. Meanwhile, their father Mason Sr (Ethan Hawke again) has returned from Alaska with the serious intention to play a part in his children's lives. While Olivia carries the burden of care, his input in the development of their characters will nevertheless become significant.

Time passing is signalled by the music played, hairstyles, the political events of the time (the Iraq War, Obama's presidential campaign) and cultural ones (a Harry Potter book launch, the Twilight films, the advent of Facebook). The acting is so naturalistic that, were it not for the presence of the well-known actors, this could be easily mistaken for documentary.

Just as many an occasional parent, Hawke is involved in the film's lighter, most entertaining scenes: a lovely exchange where the kids set the ground rules for "catch up" conversation, another where dad awkwardly attempts contraception advice in a bowling alley.

In contrast, Arquette's Olivia shoulders grim realities - from having to play "bad cop" over homework and chores, to abusive and drunken husbands. "I was someone's daughter, then someone's mother," she declares sadly at the outset. Later, the empty nest beckoning, she muses that the only chapter left in her life is her funeral.

As we're already familiar with Arquette and Hawke, the first sight of their fresh-faced selves is surprising; thereafter, the experience of watching them mature one year every 10 or 15 minutes reminds us how fast time does pass in adulthood, not just physically, but in terms of the changes it wreaks on one's ambitions and dreams.

But the focus is on Mason. And there's something extraordinary in seeing the gradual transition from round-faced, wide-eyed boy to confident teenager, one who combines both parents in his character - a free spirit with a constantly questioning and rebellious mind, alongside an innate, gentle maturity.

The film has antecedents: Michael Apted's groundbreaking Up series of documentaries, which returned to a group of Britons at seven-year intervals, and Michael Winterbottom's 2012 drama Everyday. But judged in its own right, Boyhood has a scale, detail and resonance that is remarkable, and will touch anyone who has sense to see it.