2013–2018: Boyhood and career expansion
Hawke reunited with director Linklater and co-star Delpy for the third installment of the Before trilogy, titled Before Midnight (2013). The film follows a couple, his and Delpy's characters, who spend a summer vacation in Greece with their children. Before Midnight received critical acclaim, with one from Variety naming the scene in the hotel room "one for the actors' handbook". The film earned Hawke, Linklater, and Delpy another Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Hawke next starred in the horror-thriller The Purge (2013), set in a future America where all crime is legal for one night each year. Despite mixed reviews, the film opened atop the box office on its opening weekend with a $34 million debut. In early 2013, Hawke starred in and directed the play Clive, written by Jonathan Marc Sherman and inspired by Bertolt Brecht's Baal.
Hawke prepared for his role as a former racecar driver in Getaway (2013) by attending a one-day driving school at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, where he learned high-performance driving techniques such as 180-degree spins and e-brake maneuvers. The film was critically panned. He played the title role in a Broadway production of Macbeth at the Lincoln Center Theater in late 2013. The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney criticized the "disharmonious acting styles led by Hawke's underpowered take on [his] role". Released in mid-2014, Linklater's Boyhood follows the life of an American boy from age six to eighteen, with Hawke portraying his father. The film became the best-reviewed release of 2014 and was named best film of the year by numerous critics' associations. Hawke later admitted that the film's widespread acclaim came as a surprise, recalling that when he first joined the project, it felt less like a "proper movie" and more like "a radical '60s film experiment or something".
He earned several nominations for his performance, including the Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.
Hawke reunited with the Spierig brothers for the science fiction thriller Predestination (2014), in which he played a time-traveling agent on his final assignment. Writing for Vulture, David Edelstein wrote how he enjoyed Hawke's "low-key, solemn, enigmatic" performance. He next reunited with his Gattaca director Andrew Niccol for Good Kill (2014), a contemporary war drama. In his "best screen role in years" according to Rooney, Hawke portrayed a drone pilot grappling with a troubled conscience. He made his documentary debut with Seymour: An Introduction, which premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was conceived after a dinner party attended by both Hawke and its subject, classical pianist Seymour Bernstein. Seymour: An Introduction is a profile of Bernstein, who later said that, although he was normally a private person, he was unable to decline Hawke's request to make the film because the actor was "so endearing".
Hawke had two films premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, both of which were well received. In Robert Budreau's drama Born to Be Blue (2015), he portrayed jazz musician Chet Baker, focusing on the artist's turbulent late-1960s comeback and struggle with heroin addiction. He also starred in Rebecca Miller's romantic comedy Maggie's Plan as an anthropologist and aspiring novelist, alongside Greta Gerwig and Julianne Moore. That same year, he appeared in the coming-of-age drama Ten Thousand Saints and the psychological thriller Regression opposite Emma Watson. In November 2015, Hawke published his third book, Rules for a Knight, written as a letter from a 15th-century father to his four children reflecting on moral values and personal integrity. In Ti West's western In a Valley of Violence, he played a drifter who seeks revenge in a small frontier town ruled by a ruthless marshal—a performance that critics praised.
In 2016, Hawke took on two unpleasant roles in succession, first playing the abusive father of a promising young baseball player in The Phenom, and then the stern husband of Maud Lewis—portrayed by Sally Hawkins—in Maudie. While some critics commended his surprising range, others argued that Hawke was "miscast" as a harsh figure. He reunited with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua and co-star Denzel Washington for The Magnificent Seven (2016), a remake of the 1960 western film of the same name. In the film, Hawke played a former Confederate sharpshooter struggling with PTSD from the American Civil War. In the US, the film grossed $34.7 million in its opening weekend, topping the box office. Also in 2016, Hawke narrated the interactive short film Invasion!, which earned him and his co-creators a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive – Original Daytime Content, and released his fourth book, Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars, which chronicles the conflicts between the Apache and the US.
Hawke starred in Paul Schrader's drama First Reformed (2017) as a former military chaplain tormented by the death of his son, whom he had encouraged to join the armed forces, while grappling with the looming threat of climate change. Critics, including Slate's K. Austin Collins, praised his performance, calling it "extraordinarily well-tuned" and stating that "every ounce of likability, vulnerability, angry cynicism and ineptitude [in his career] seems to be summed up here". Hawke had two films premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. In Juliet, Naked, a romantic comedy adapted from Nick Hornby's 2009 novel of the same name, he played an obscure rock musician whose eponymous album drives the plot. Blaze, his third direction, is a biographical film about the obscure country musician Blaze Foley and was selected for the festival's main competition. After several critically acclaimed projects, Texas Monthly described Hawke's career in 2018 as undergoing a "renaissance" since his peak in 2001 with Training Day.
