Catch Me if You Can (12A)

Taking us for a ride

Steven Spielberg, having glimpsed the brave new world of the future in Minority Report, now opens a window on to the innocence of the past in Catch Me If You Can. A comedy of imposture, it is based on the autobiography of Frank W Abagnale Jnr, a young man whose exploits during the second half of the Sixties would earn him a reputation as one of the greatest con artists America had ever seen. It's smart, good-looking entertainment that absorbs for more than two hours yet almost instantly evaporates once you leave the cinema.

Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has watched his beloved father fail in business and in marriage, responds to this hurt by launching an audacious series of scams: he first passes himself off as a Pan Am co-pilot, having twigged that it is far easier for a man in uniform to earn a stranger's trust. Riding for free in the cockpit jump seat and bouncing cheques from state to state, Frank becomes the Pimpernel of American fraud. In his brief career, which also involves impersonating an ER doctor in Georgia and an attorney in Louisiana, he manages to finagle more than $4m of the bank's money. The squeaks become narrower once FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) gets on his case, having made the alarming discovery that this young pretender really is young – a teenager, in fact.

Spielberg, in an altogether looser mode than usual, makes Frank's resourcefulness perversely admirable and droll. The boy has started from scratch after all, and who would have imagined the forgery of Pan Am paychecks should begin with steaming the company logo off model aeroplanes? Leonardo DiCaprio, badly out of his depth in Gangs of New York, is far more assured as this career impostor, and one can see how his boyish and strangely impenetrable good looks might take people in. Like a good magician he understands about misdirection, but he also has an amazingly cool nerve: when the FBI man bursts into Frank's motel room where evidence of his forgery is strewn all over, he simply switches masks and convinces Hanratty that he himself is an investigator from the Financial Department. The film looks back to a more trusting age, of course, when ID checks were less stringent and paranoia over crime wasn't so hysterical. The brio of the Sixties is worked into the movie's fabric, from the superbly slinky title sequence (think Blue Note jazz album meets Pink Panther) right down to Tom Hanks's dark suit and porkpie hat, themselves a retro-tribute to the carefree glamour of Sinatra on the cover of Come Fly With Me. (The song is blasted out, needless to say, as Frank strolls into Miami airport surrounded by a bevy of trolley dollies.) The era is there too in the medical dramas Frank watches on daytime television: how else will he know how to behave in the emergency room if he doesn't study Doctor Kildare? One can imagine the young Spielberg glued to the same TV dramas, only he was checking the way the director worked, not the actors.

There's a moment when Frank watches Sean Connery in Goldfinger exercising his laconic charm on Pussy Galore. (He soon has an immaculate three-piece suit made up exactly like Connery's.) This hints, in a veiled fashion, at the real Frank Abagnale's motivation as a con man: on his own admission, he wanted to get laid. But Spielberg, all too characteristically, won't deal with the messy, grown-up business of sex. There is surely no other mainstream director of his generation who has so skittishly avoided the subject. In the film's retelling (the script is by Jeff Nathanson) Frank's reason for fleeing home and plunging into conmanship is – you'll never guess – the trauma of parental absence.

Christopher Walken is very good as Frank's father, but no sooner have we witnessed his uxorious devotion to his wife (Nathalie Baye) than the marriage is suddenly collapsing and Walken is being arrested for tax evasion. So it was a broken home that caused young Frank to stray. For Heaven's sake, you think, can't Spielberg obsess about something else for a change?

The answer is, apparently not. Frank is not only marooned from his parents, he doesn't have any friends either, which his pursuer eventually twigs when Frank calls him one Christmas Eve: "You've got no one else to talk to!" Hanratty laughs down the phone. The virtuoso escape artist has found the one trap he can't wriggle out of – his own lonely self. His need for imposture might have prompted something more unsettling and dark, a bit like Tom Ripley's desire to be "a fake somebody instead of a real nobody". But Spielberg again chooses a soft landing for his hero, and has the FBI man conceiving a sort of paternal affection for his quarry, to the point where he actually becomes his protector against the draconian ranks of the French police (Frank's paper trail has fetched up in France, the home of his mother).

The idea that the Fed and the fugitive somehow need one another isn't new – it has become the staple of nearly every manhunt picture made in Hollywood. Wrapped tight with Spielberg's soft-focus sentiment for the "lost child", and you may begin to see why Catch Me If You Can isn't quite the rip-roaring chase comedy that the trailer had promised. It has its moments of exuberance, its felicities of design, and as an overall experience it beats the pants off heavy-spirited schmaltz like Amistad and A.I. (his worst film?). But in the end, like the cheques its hero forges, it doesn't survive close inspection.