From the first movie he saw (The Greatest Show on Earth, De Mille’s 1952 Oscar winner) to memories of meeting filmmaker John Ford on the Paramount lot, this broadly appealing account of how Spielberg was smitten by the medium holds the keys to so much of hs later filmography.

More similar to Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” than it is to European art films such as “The 400 Blows, “The Fabelmans” takes viewers into the home of the world’s most beloved and most commercial living director.

It’s an oddly sanitized zone where even the traumas and hard spots–bullying, anti-Semitism, financial disadvantage, and divorce–are softened.

Spielberg’s movies have featured certain recurring themes, especially in the way parents relate to their kids. Whether it’s an emotionally distant dad letting his family fall apart in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or an adult Peter Pan fighting for his children in “Hook,” such bonds matter in Spielberg’s on-screen fictions because the same connections broke down in his off-screen reality.

The director, with repeat collaborator Tony Kushner (“Munich,” West Side Story”) helping him to write his first script since 2001’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” shares what his own family was like, while allowing room for certain amount of creative license.

The father is an engineer named Burt (Paul Dano) whose early work in the field of computer science forces the Fabelmans to move houses multiple times over a few years’ time, from New Jersey to Arizona to Northern California.

Mitzi, his more emotionally sensitive mother (Michelle Williams), who could have been concert pianist, goes out of her way to encourage the creative interests of her son Sam (Gabrielle LaBelle).

The eccentric Mitzi is also prone to depression and behaviors that the young boy can’t always fully understand, but which decades of introspection and analysis have apparently clarified in his mind.

Mom has a similar capacity to psychoanalyze her kids, recognizing how little Sammy (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord in the earliest scenes) can’t seem to handle a train wreck he witnessed in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Early one, Steven the boy reconstructs how the effect was done by using a model train set and his own 8mm camera. And thus a filmmaker is born — with an anecdote that ties Spielberg’s origins back to the apocryphal story of the Lumière brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” having stunned cinema’s first audiences into leaping from their seats.

Filmmaking is a contagious compulsion–and the bug bit Spielberg. He suggests that the Normandy Beach opening of “Saving Private Ryan” might have its roots in “Escape to Nowhere,” for example?

The movie gets more serious when Sam makes an alarming discovery among the footage he took of a family camping trip(hint: it’s related to his mother’s illicit affair)

This moral dilemma arises at the same time that Sam’s great-uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch in scene-stealing performance) drops by to deliver a pep talk about how art and family don’t mix.

The Fabelmans are moving again, abandoning honorary uncle Bennie (Seth Rogen) in Arizona, only to reconnect with cranky grandma Hadassah (Jeannie Berlin) once they reach the Golden state of California.

Moving is harder when it happens during senior year, as Sam experiences it. Until now, Spielberg hasn’t shared much of the lad’s school life.

At his new California high school, Sam is bullied by letterman jocks who give him grief for being a Jew; he falls for the rich Christian girl Monica (Chloe East) in what amounts to the film’s least interesting episodes.

More significantly, he discovers the power of film to influence audiences — a superpower he promises to keep secret, “unless I make a movie about it” one day, Sam says.

For years, Spielberg publicly held his father responsible for the breakup of his parents’ marriage, but “The Fabelmans” paints a different picture.

Newcomer LaBelle is handsome and likeable, but ultimately flat (due to the fact that he’s at that age too square?) He’s clearly more focused on doing right by his parents.

Michelle Williams renders a delirious late-night dance, which is borderline embarrassing in its exhibitionist elements.

And there is a significant mother-son reconciliation scene, where she tells the boy, whose father has never approved of his “hobby,” “You do what your heart says you have to so you don’t owe anyone your life.”

Spielberg’s been hiding the facts of his own upbringing behind fictional families.

Kaminski’s slightly artificial way of shooting this picture borrows from midcentury domestic dramas. Was Arthur Spielberg (to whom the film is dedicated) really as traditional as he appears here?

Though enjoyable, The Fabelmans is a bit too synthetic and “clean” for its own good, but it’s a film that Spielberg must have felt a strong need t make.

I was wondering at the end if the ever-optimistic Spielberg, known for his “Suburban Cinema of Contentment”, might have made a messier, nastier, and more realistic memory film had he directed that same story (and good and bad events) at a younger or mid-life age?