Sammy Fabelman, a young Jewish boy in Arizona in the 1950s, discovers the movies after his parents take him to see The Greatest Show on Earth. He starts filming his own backyard war movies. His mother is a piano prodigy who gave up her career. His father is an engineer who will keep moving the family. The film fictionalises Spielberg’s own adolescence into a 151-minute meditation on what art costs the people who watch it being made.