Catch Me If You Can

Crime does pay for Spielberg with this conman caper

Last year, Tom Hanks had the misfortune to be involved in Road To Perdition, one of the most ponderous father-and-son dramas yet to have limped to the screen. This year, he makes amends as another not-so-big daddy in Steven Spielberg's footloose true-story Catch Me If You Can.

Hanks wears a lemon-sucking grimace and a pen-pusher's specs as Carl Hanratty, the FBI agent who trails the teenage conman Frank Abagnale Jr – a pixieish Leonardo DiCaprio – across America in the 1960s.

Frank is a tease whose masquerades graduate from the plodding (he first poses as a substitute French teacher) to the airborne (within weeks he's a Pan Am pilot). The fun he has hopping states, as well as beds, matters more to him than the millions of dollars he amasses from cheque fraud. While Carl mixes with housewives in a grim laundromat where his sheets and shirts all turn out pink, Frank is in a hotel suite with a long-legged model who uses her teeth to seductively tug off her gloves, finger by finger.

But this is no simple tale of responsibility outshone by hedonism. As the chase progresses, both men are galvanised and nourished by its demands. Frank has never been kept in check by his sweet but defeated father (Christopher Walken); when he calls on dad during one transatlantic jaunt, he looks at this man who never introduced a whiff of order into his childhood, and pleads: "Ask me to stop." But he doesn't. So Frank finds the father he needs in Carl. The hunt makes him feel wanted, and Carl, who is trying to grab occasional hours with his own estranged child, gets the nearest thing he has had to paternal duty.

Put in those terms, it might appear that Spielberg has returned to the bogus psychology that made his 1991 film Hook sink like a stone. But Catch Me If You Can hardly touches the ground from its dynamic animated credit sequence onwards – visually and thematically it is as light as it is rich.

People still recall that boastful shot of a red-coated girl passing through the monochrome hell of Schindler's List, but that was a decade ago, and the new Spielberg is better equipped to integrate his imagery, which is how he arrives at this picture's gorgeous flourishes – a dollar bill slipping under a door and dancing on the breeze, watched by a dumbstruck Carl; a fleet of toy Pan Am models submerged in a hotel bathtub; a bride-to- be brandishing a bouquet of hard currency.

Even the composer John Williams has eschewed his usual bombast in favour of a flirtatious but subtly dark jazz score that captures the mood of this delightful canter on the wild side.