From left, Paul Dano, Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord, and Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans (TIFF)

You don’t have to be an ardent fan of Steven Spielberg to enter his semiautobiographical bildungsroman, set in 1950s/’60s suburbia, though it wouldn’t hurt. This is the origin story of the filmmaker, not necessarily his films, with hints of the early inspirations for his future blockbusters. At its heart, its early turning point revolves around falling in love with the moving image, first, and then filmmaking, second. Just as Laura Dern stared gobsmacked at a giant dinosaur in Jurassic Park or the scientists looked up in awe at an approaching alien spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, here a young boy experiences the big screen for the first time, eyes fixed, mouth agape.

Before heading out to a New Jersey movie palace, Sammy (first played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) is terrified at the prospect of looming, giant images, never having been to the movies before. Kneeling down to his eye level, his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), reassures him that movies are “dreams you’ll never forget,” perhaps the most foreshadowing moment in the screenplay by Spielberg and Tony Kushner. As Sammy and his folks behold Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, Sammy looks stunned witnessing the movie’s climatic train crash. (Though this 1952 star-studded melodrama currently has the reputation as one of the worst best picture Oscar winners ever, it still makes quite an impression. The train wreck/pileup is spectacular, and was mesmerizing to this reviewer when, as a kid, I saw it on TV.)

Sammy has become mesmerized, and has dreams based on the movie. When he gets a train set for Hanukkah, he reenacts DeMille’s wreck with it, and Mitzi covertly gives him dad’s 8mm camera to make a “secret movie,” a reenactment of the accident. While other boys may play sports after school, Sammy enlists his sisters into making mini-B movie homages, using up all of the household toilet paper for mummy costumes.

In the first of two relocations, his electrical engineer dad receives a promotion, and the family packs up and moves cross country to Phoenix. Now Sammy casts his Boy Scout troop in a shoot-’em-up western, and cleverly pokes holes in the film print to simulate gun fire. The rambunctious camaraderie and the 8mm genre tributes-within-the-film contrast to life with his parents, which is more out of a Douglas Sirk film or A Woman Under the Influence than a John Ford western when Mitzi’s moods change: She doesn’t want to leave Arizona and move yet again, this time for dad’s IBM job in Northern California.

The tone, from time to time, turns toward a kitchen sink-drama, becoming less a show biz biopic and more about the eroding marriage of Mitzi and Sammy’s quiet, soft-spoken father, Burt (Paul Dano), who remains in the background, overshadowed by the histrionics of his wife. Taking as much air as Mitzi is Uncle Bennie (Seth Rogan), not a blood relation but dad’s best friend and business partner, who is ever present at family dinners and moves with the Fabelmans to Phoenix.

Mitzi is the prototype in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique: a classically trained pianist of thwarted ambitions—she plays Schumann wonderfully. However, Williams’s Mitzi is not a steadily drawn-out portrait. Williams is always animated and announces her character immediately. From her first entrance, Mitzi’s eyes beam with childlike mischief. (She is unpredictable; it is Mitzi, and not one of her kids, who brings home a monkey.) The contrast between the giggly extrovert and her button-down, stuffed shirt of a husband never varies. Often, Williams’s performance overpowers everyone else on screen.

On his first day of high school in California, Sammy (now played by Gabriel LaBelle) faces a gauntlet of big men on campus, who make no bones about why they have targeted the newcomer. Jock: “I told you he was a k***.” However, this chapter (Beverly Hills, 90210 meets Happy Days) may be the first ever Spielberg sequence that veers toward an all-out sex comedy, thanks in part to Chloe East as the popular girl next door, Monica.

To say that Monica’s into Christianity is an understatement. She has turned her bedroom into a shrine, with a rosary draped across a wall, surrounded by multiple artworks of Christ, alongside cutout photos of teen idols. There, winsome and direct, Monica proselytizes through flirtation, telling Sammy that Jesus was someone just like him, “a handsome Jewish boy.” It’s a wonder that he doesn’t convert right then and there. (Sadly, Sammy’s adventures continue on but end before his real-life counterpart directed, at age 22, the indominable Joan Crawford.)

Like his on-screen counterpart, or should I say doppelganger—LaBelle has a resemblance to the director—Spielberg also has three sisters, grew up in suburbia, and his parents divorced. Much of the DIY movies that the precocious and problem-solving Sammy makes resemble what the young Spielberg whipped up—the re-creations of the boy’s 8mm or 16mm tributes to war epics and westerns go on a little too long in what is otherwise a well-paced and constantly evolving story.

Yet, keep in mind that this is nevertheless fictional. In the 2017 documentary, Spielberg, directed by Susan Lacy, Spielberg candidly reveals that he thought, as a teen, that it was his father who had left the family and angrily blamed him. In his fictionalization, it’s the other way around: Sammy targets his rancor toward his mother after finding out a barely concealed secret. In fact, the documentary informs the background of The Fabelmans, while pointing to connections to Spielberg’s varied, prolific filmography.

The breakup of his parents’ marriage and their divorce led to, some might say, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which, according to Spielberg, was about “how divorce affects childhood and how it affects children” or that his boyhood 8mm projects were precursors for his B-movie homage in the Indiana Jones series. Though The Fabelmans is nothing like Spielberg’s war epic Empire of the Sun, it too features a “lost boy trying to figure out where he belongs in this world.” There is also a glimpse of his dancing mother wearing a blue nightgown, which Williams reenacts. (Sporting a severely bobbed blond wig, Williams resembles her.)

This amicable, eminently entertaining, episodic coming-of-age saga won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere. However, one needs to read the fine print. This award is based on the votes of filmgoers who bothered to rate films on the TIFF app or website. Also, the movie had three public screenings at the Princess of Wales Theatre, the largest festival venue, with 2,000 seats—the screening I attended there was packed—while the bulk of the other movies at the festival played at far smaller theaters, so you don’t have to do the math to figure out that certain films had advantages.

The Fabelmans will open wide theatrically on November 23.