Accepting a Golden Globe for his direction of semi-autobiographical coming-of-ager The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg confessed: ‘I’ve been hiding from this story since I was 17 years old. I put a lot of things in the way of it.’ Made following the death of his parents (who he feared hurting), and dedicated to their memory, the film is an act of cinematic catharsis and a fascinating insight into a movie magician.

In a story that shifts from New Jersey to Arizona to California, the young Spielberg becomes the fictional Sammy Fabelman (played winningly as a child by Mateo Zoryan and as a teen by the charismatic and capable newcomer Gabriel LaBelle). A formative cinema trip to see The Greatest Show On Earth places Sammy on the path to future filmmaking success as he sets about shooting his own movies with the support of his eccentric, former musician mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), with his brilliant engineer father Burt (Paul Dano) less enthused.

Although it can feel overwritten (Spielberg worked on the screenplay with regular collaborator Tony Kushner), The Fabelmans is a vivid, affectionate and extremely entertaining portrait of domestic life, and strife, and of an evolving passion. Sporting an odd little bob, Williams puts in a big, sometimes melodramatic, sometimes emotionally sincere turn as Sammy’s free-spirited, increasingly unstable mother that conveys what it’s like to have a larger-than-life character at the centre of your world. Dano is suitably awkward and understated as Burt, while Seth Rogen reins in his comedic instincts as Burt’s right-hand man Bennie. And if Judd Hirsch nearly steals the whole darn show when he pops up as ‘mad’ Uncle Boris, it's the closing cameo from a peer of Spielberg’s that may be the film’s most inspired touch.

There are, undoubtedly, some rose-tinted recollections alongside the fictional additions but Spielberg also confronts some uncomfortable truths about his parents’ marriage and his own ruthless self-absorption in a film that’s less mawkish than its marketing would have you believe, and indeed than many of his previous efforts have been on the subject of family. As he went on to say in that acceptance speech: ‘Everybody sees me as a success story. But nobody really knows who we are until we’re courageous enough to tell them.’

The Fabelmans is in cinemas now.