Fairyland review – moving memoir of queer parenting and new kinds of family in 70s San Francisco

Andrew Durham’s tender adaptation of Alysia Abbott’s book finds warmth, humour and heartbreak in an unconventional family unit shaped by love and loss

For anyone familiar with the Bay Area in the 1970s and 80s, this offers a glorious wallow in nostalgia, from the grainy archive footage of San Francisco Gay Freedom parades to the novelty of sushi at a book launch and the new wave hairstyles. But this film is not just about the set dressing and the costumes; at the story’s core is what was then a new kind of family. A gay father raises his young daughter in San Francisco after his wife, her mother, is killed in a car accident; they live first in a squalid commune in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood and later move to slightly more bougie digs. The dad, Steve (Scoot McNairy), is a man with his foot only half out of the closet when the tragedy happens. He loves his daughter Alysia (Nessa Dougherty, then Coda’s Emilia Jones as a teen) deeply and turns down an offer from his ultra-straight mother-in-law (Geena Davis) to raise the little girl.

Nevertheless, Steve is also a bit selfish and neglectful, likely to convince himself that he’s teaching Alysia independence when, for example, he tells her to get a bus across town instead of picking her up from school. There are echoes of the parenting techniques showcased in Marielle Heller’s adaptation of The Diary of a Teenage Girl which was set in a similar period, except that Alysia ends up a little less damaged than the heroine of that story. In fact, she turns out as independent and resilient as her father hoped she’d be, even if she never learned to ride a bicycle.