Every director of merit deserves one vanity picture. P. T. Anderson released the visually superb Licorice Pizza despite it having more to do with giving his army of production designers work than a story that needed to be told. Tarantino has nearly ten vanity pictures under his belt with scripts that are so in love with themselves Narcissus would be jealous. A chance to amuse Tarantino has never been missed by Tarantino. Van Gogh modeled for himself an extraordinary 35 times. Writers like Hesse, Kerouac, Sylvia Plath and Jack London all looked no further than the mirror for inspiration. So, an auteur's self portrait is historically justified. Furthermore, Spielberg is not blind to the trend of making a biopic for every pop culture icon in history of humanity so why should he allow another production crew first crack at his story in 30 years?

While Tarantino thinks he is Dialogue's equivalent of Mozart and the removal of a single line of superfluous jive vernacular would cause his whole precious post modern universe to implode, Spielberg is far more humble and concise as he employed the brilliant Tony Kushner to cowrite and navigate a quirky, difficult, real life, coming of age reminiscence that includes mostly uncomfortable stretch marks few would want to expose to the world. (I credit Kushner for refusing to allow a Great White Shark reference to be made during the beach scene. Or I credit editor Michael Kahn for cutting it out )

Spielberg has put serving the audience at the top of his list of priorities long enough to allow one indulgence of his own origin story, audience be damned. There were only a few moments where I felt I was secretly reading someone's teenage diary and felt the urge to look away.

The director mostly manages to avoid the pitfalls of these story lines that aim directly at awkwardness, isolation, equally isolated allies, cardboard villains, family dysfunction, implausible heroics, etc, by concentrating on the truly unique dynamics he experienced (the protagonist's sexual awakening is most unusual. No heroics are to be found in this film) and not just in the context of adolescence but in the context of filmmaking.

What inspired Spielberg to want to make pictures? Well, if the movie Cinema Paradiso didn't answer that question well enough for you then The Fabelmans, a love letter to his own beginnings, should fill in the gaps.