My first impression of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” the new film by Richard Linklater that opens Friday, was that it was a rare film by the Houston native that wasn’t defined by time.

So often in Linklater’s films, time is part of the story’s frame, with sorts of deadlines as in his three “Before” films: “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” “Before Midnight.” And then there’s “Boyhood,” which he shot for parts of 12 years. Even his baseball movie, “Everybody Wants Some!!,” and his Orson Welles movie, “Me and Orson Welles,” had deadlines that loomed over the story. “Bernadette” has no such time-related element in its actual structure.

But Linklater points out that “time is in fact a big character here.”

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He brings up how time “transforms us, how it can slip away. Where did these two decades go?”

He’s talking about two decades in the life of Bernadette Fox, played by Cate Blanchett. The fictional character was a lauded, progressive architect, renowned internationally for her work. And then she dropped out of sight. Or, more specifically, she dropped out of sight within her profession as her family dynamic presented a gravitational pull that proved stronger than her work.

And so Bernadette begins this story coiled by years of jittery, anti-social hermetic existence.

“It’s very much a portrait of an artist,” Linklater says, “who’s not practicing their art, which is a little dangerous.”

Finding inspiration in others’ work

Linklater has a sharp eye for stories that haven’t been overly consumed. In just the past 10 or so years, he’s always either drummed up stories of his own or found stories that hadn’t been done to death , to tell on film. He would write “Boyhood” a little at a time over the years, and “Before Midnight” was a collaborative piece with stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy based on characters they’d first played in 1995 in “Before Sunrise.” But “Bernadette” is his second consecutive adaptation of a novel, after “Last Flag Flying.” He found that story in Darryl Ponicsan’s 2005 novel about three Vietnam veterans reunited after one of their sons is killed in Iraq.

Maria Semple’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” was published in 2012 and was far from an unknown book, as it spent most of a year on the New York Times’ bestseller list. But the book’s success follows something of a pattern with other successful pieces of fiction written by women that receive little recognition by men.

“Where hardly any guys I’d mention it to had heard of it, it seemed like almost every woman over a certain age I talked to had read it or at least had heard about it,” Linklater says. “I think most guys hear even superficially what it’s about and put it in some kind of chick-lit category, which is too bad — they’d really like it.”

And he has a point. Though Linklater admits, “I thought it was a great mother/daughter story,” the narrative really is probing rather than judgmental.

Billy Crudup’s Elgin Branch, Bernadette’s husband, is hardly a villain in the story. But without discussion, his career was the default priority over hers. Drift and resentment were allowed to swell, and Bernadette retreated further into their home, which was being consumed by its environment.

“Neither in this relationship is a fundamentally bad person here,” Linklater says. “Just entrenched in their respective ruts to such a degree that they’re no longer seeing each other accurately.”

The stifling of her creative impulses provoked actions in other parts of her life that created rising tension that reached a boiling point.

“Bernadette has a lot of colliding conditions and impulses — obsessive parent, anti-social, blocked artist,” Linklater says. “All while navigating a long-term relationship that has drifted off its axis. So much of herself is in need of a recalibration.”

23 films in 31 years

Surely, any creative type could relate to Bernadette’s predicament. Observing Linklater’s career across 30 years, however, one finds few lulls. At 59, he has operated almost without interruption.

After his parents’ marriage ended, he split his youth between Huntsville, where his mother lived and taught, and Bellaire, where his father lived. He played baseball and studied English at Sam Houston State. After college, he worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and devoured just about all films screening at the River Oaks Theatre.

Linklater relocated to Austin in the mid-’80s and studied film more formally. He made “It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books” in 1988, which barely circulated. His second film, “Slacker,” drew greater notice two years later, and from that point forward, Linklater became a central part of Austin’s independent-cinema scene.

He has made 23 films in three decades, never going more than three years without something new in theaters. His filmography has also been notably varied. Even when he returns to characters, as he has done with the “Before” trilogy, he finds some new narrative path.

By contrast, Bernadette transitions from toast of the architecture world to a mystery. Any time some bit of her past flares up, she douses it, but the process of suppressing her creative urges begins to cause chaos.

When a family trip gets scuttled, Bernadette quietly slips out and goes on a journey. The rest is best left to viewers. Though the film is laced with humor, the presentation of her crisis throughout feels sincere.

At its heart is the connection between Bernadette and daughter Bee, which is strained but also boasts stronger connective tissue than the one between the two parents.

A Cyndi Lauper singalong is among the sweetest moments, as it finds Bernadette with her guard down.

“I’m a real music-cranked-up-in-the-car kind of guy,” Linklater says. “And when my teenage daughters first saw a cut of the movie, they just squealed at that particular song because it was right out of our lives.”

Bee serves as our narrator — fitting because her vision of the story is the one least diminished by time and the familiarity and resentment it bears.

The Menil connection

Though something of a polymath, Linklater doesn’t profess to any deep knowledge of the architecture that defines Bernadette’s creative reckoning. That said, he says he “always found Houston very inspiring in this regard.”

His grandmother lived near the Rothko Chapel, so he says he’s visited that distinctive and meditative space “ever since I can remember.”

Though none of “Bernadette” is set or shot here, the film does include a little tip of the hat to the Menil Collection.

That Houston building, too, has a story that echoes the one in “Bernadette.” The Menil is a formidable display of creative ideas, all in a free public space that was built more than 30 years ago. Even that sturdy, well-lit structure needed an update after enduring decades of Houston weather. It closed for part of 2018 and reopened anew late last year.

Linklater describes Bernadette’s path as beginning anew with a breaking point.

“It’s probably now or never for her, and this crisis moment is looming,” he says. So she heads south. Far south, at which point the story becomes one of adventure and discovery.

“It’s is exactly what she’s needed,” Linklater says, “to jar her out of this loop she’s stuck in.”