Five stars for The Fabelmans — Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated memoir of his youth

What if Steven Spielberg made the best films of his life and nobody came? The overstatement in the question is only small. His new movie, The Fabelmans, a memoir of his youth, may not quite have the popcorn brilliance of Jaws or the weight of Schindler’s List. It is, however, a richly insightful, beautifully made curate’s egg. It has also just bombed at the US box office. In that, it follows West Side Story, the last excellent film Spielberg made for an audience who promptly stood him up.

Sometimes a review should be blunt. Go and see The Fabelmans: a chance to see a maestro at work. He won’t be around forever. Sceptics should also know that, while this is literally the Steven Spielberg movie, it is also some way from what a Spielberg movie is thought to be: all syrup and sentiment.

For one, that reputation was always unfair. (Tony Kushner, dramatising life as co-writer, discussed this in a recent FT interview.) But even taking that into account, something much stranger is happening here. Yes, the director’s proxy Sammy Fabelman (mostly played by Gabriel LaBelle) duly falls for cinema. But the spell often seems a curse. At five, the first movie he sees is Cecil B DeMille’s lurid The Greatest Show on Earth; it leaves part of him forever petrified. Years later, the teenage auteur watches his own 8mm footage from an idyllic camping trip and a tiny detail cracks his world in two. For a love letter to cinema, The Fabelmans feels a lot like an exorcism.

Yet the sun is often out. The story runs the length of the Eisenhower 1950s into the early 1960s. And here, at first, the gently oddball Fabelmans fit so well with each other, it feels as if nothing very bad could ever befall them. Michelle Williams is Sammy’s ardent concert pianist mother, Mitzi; Paul Dano his computer pioneer father, Burt. A Spielbergian landscape unfolds: the suburban lawns of Phoenix, Arizona, where homemade movies evolve into complex, weekend epics. And all, fundamentally, is well.

Then the family collapses. The aftershock would ripple into, among other movies, E.T., that American children’s classic set in a broken home. Will The Fabelmans mean more to those with an interest in the work of the guy who made it? Inevitably. But as much as the film is about the boy director, it’s about his parents. And parents in general: those eternal mysteries we all have in common.

Williams is terrific. It also makes sense that Spielberg started the project after the death of his mother, Leah Adler. This is the true love letter, one as acutely human as people are.

Mitzi and Burt can also seem a temptingly neat equation: lyrical spirit plus master engineer. Put ’em together and you get the essence of cinema. But we are, in turn, more than the sum of our folks. The particular nature of Sammy is noted by family black sheep Uncle Boris (a glorious Judd Hirsch). He alone sees how the kid regards his camera. Sammy, Boris knows, loves his family. “But this, I think, you love a little more.” What a line. The selfishness of giants laid bare.

Approaching young adulthood, there are high-school shenanigans, kooky first girlfriends. Anti-Semitism too. The tone gets complicated. Adolescence often is. Flippancy aside, that is the movie’s signature: the acceptance that two things can be going on at once. Loving marriages fall apart; callings are driven by talent and fear. And films that seem simple are actually hugely sophisticated. To finish, you even get a silly, marvellous, note-perfect joke. May all our life stories end so well.

★★★★★

In UK cinemas from January 27 and in US cinemas now