The Fabelmans movie: Steven Spielberg’s Best Picture favorite isn’t what you think.

The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s semiautobiographical film about coming of age as a filmmaker in a loving, fractured family in mid-20th-century suburbia, has every element in place to be a cozy cinephilic nostalgia trip. Filmed in burnished, buttery tones by the director’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, this chronicle of boomer adolescence includes multiple trips to the movies by the wide-eyed junior Spielberg stand-in. The Fabelmans’ script, written by frequent collaborator Tony Kushner is both insightful and refreshingly straightforward about the way young Sammy Fabelman uses film as a way to master his most primal fears and desires, and the way his mother Mitzi —a would-be concert pianist whose career was sidetracked by stay-at-home motherhood—serves as both his most encouraging cheerleader and his problematic muse. Lest that last paragraph make The Fabelmans sound like a maudlin sobfest, it should be said that, for the most part, this is a comedy, full of sparkling supporting performances: Jeannie Berlin as Sam’s dry-humored grandmother, Judd Hirsch as a visiting uncle with terrifying stories from his life as a lion tamer, Chloe East as a devout Christian teenager who insists Sam pray on his knees with her before they make out.