Somewhere Between Freedom and Forgiveness, Find Andrew Durham’s Fairyland

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Fairyland has the warmth of a “slice of life” film but the breadth of a life itself. Andrew Durham’s debut feature, produced by Sofia Coppola and adapted from Alysia Abbott’s memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, carries the quiet ache of memory and travels through time, capturing a child’s-eye view of queer liberation, artistic idealism, and the AIDS crisis. Every frame feels composed like a photograph in a museum, a portrait of two lives unfolding in parallel, a father learning to live freely, and a daughter trying to find herself in the wide-open wake of that freedom.

The story begins with a phone call that shatters a quiet morning. Five-year-old Alysia learns that her mother has died in a car accident. Her father, played by Scoot McNairy, fully dissolves into the role of poet Steve Abbott. Steve decides to leave their suburban life behind and move to San Francisco, where he can live openly as a gay man. What follows is a coming-of-age story told through the small collisions of two people trying to rebuild a life from loss.

In their new city, Steve and young Alysia, played by an enchanted and melancholic Nessa Dougherty, join a group of eccentric roommates in a bohemian Victorian house that feels alive with art, queerness, and community. Maria Bakalova plays Paulette, a spirited roommate who becomes an older-sister figure to Alysia, while Adam Lambert appears as one of Steve’s boyfriends. Their household becomes a portrait of liberation and blurred boundaries, the line between father and friend, between home and world, between gender and sexuality and family.

Durham’s direction is thoughtful and sincere, overflowing with personal connection and lived experience. Fairyland exists because Sofia Coppola, who first read Abbott’s memoir a decade ago, was moved by its intimacy and its San Francisco setting. She described it as a kind of Paper Moon for a new generation. After optioning the book, Coppola turned to her longtime friend and collaborator Andrew Durham, knowing his history mirrored the story’s emotional core. Like Abbott, Durham grew up in San Francisco after his father came out, splitting time between the suburbs and the city’s queer heart. Though the threat of tragedy hangs over Fairyland, it never diminishes the film’s emotional weight. As a viewer, you carry a heavy heart that knows where the story is likely heading, yet some part of you still hopes a miracle might intervene.

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The cinematography by Greta Zozula has a diaristic quality, often capturing scenes from Alysia’s point of view. In the early years, the film takes on a grainy texture, the world seen through a child’s eyes, partial, impressionistic, full of overheard conversations and unanswered questions. Alysia’s constant eavesdropping becomes a major vehicle for storytelling. She is always listening, peeking, absorbing, from the laughter and drunken howls of her father’s succession of lovers to whispered arguments. To watch Fairyland is to be placed inside her growing mind, on the other side of a thin wall where adult life is happening just beyond comprehension.

Emilia Jones, who broke out in CODA, plays the teenage Alysia with a poignant mix of sharpness and vulnerability. As the 1980s arrive, so does rebellion. Alysia resents her father’s openness, the way he unapologetically reads poems about their trauma and personal lives at parties, the way their unconventional world makes her feel exposed and out of control. She buries herself in the search for a normal adolescence. There are threads of resentment braided into threads of love and understanding.

The tenderness of Fairyland lies in its refusal to simplify or reduce complex individuals to character tropes. Steve is loving and devoted but also negligent and self-absorbed. He encourages Alysia’s independence even when it leaves her lonely. “I’m not neglecting you,” he says. “I’m teaching you independence.” It is a line that travels across decades, the justification of an artist, a queer man, and a father who wants to do right but does not always know how. We see Alysia grow, and then we watch her harden. She hides her father’s identity from friends. When the AIDS crisis begins to consume the San Francisco she grew up in, Alysia returns home from studying abroad in Paris to tend to her dying father. We finally witness Alysia happy, open, and secure, but it lasts only briefly, before she is catapulted into the role of caregiver. Of course, she is angry at the world, and her eyes are gray with depression, but she isn’t governed by fear. In many ways, this is the culminating point of her father teaching her independence. Alysia vacuums clean carpets because the sound helps her sick father sleep. She picks up his medication and watches her “Fairyland” collapse.

The film’s emotional climax is the state of understanding and forgiveness that is reached right before the film’s major death. “You were a precocious child,” Steve tells his daughter. “And you were a childish adult,” she replies. It is a moment that captures what Fairyland stands for, the blurring of parent and child, the idea that we grow up alongside one another, never fully formed. The concept of it being “your parent’s first time living, too” pulses consistently throughout the film, a universal impact any viewer will absorb.

Sofia Coppola’s fingerprints are visible throughout the making of Fairyland. Like Somewhere or Lost in Translation, Fairyland lingers on intimacy and isolation, but Durham’s voice is distinctly his own. Where Coppola’s world is often one of ennui and privilege, Durham’s is grounded in the grit and vulnerability of chosen family.

Fairyland works best when it simply breathes and allows feeling to rise unspoken. There are moments when subtext would have spoken louder than the dialogue. Regardless, the film sets out to tell a deeply personal story and succeeds with grace. I left the premiere feeling changed. Beside me, an older gay couple wept softly, and I thought of what this film must have unlocked in them, the faces of friends, the weight of a history. Durham does not shy away from the sheer magnitude of the AIDS crisis or from its haunting omnipresence. Newspaper spreads filled with photographs of young men, graffiti scrawled with slurs across San Francisco’s walls. As the film matures and its whimsy fades, darkness takes on a shape.

Yet even in that darkness, there is light and color. Durham never lets the story collapse into despair. Instead, this is a story about strength and duality, how love, memory, and art endure beyond loss. The honest miracle of Fairyland is that instead of avoiding heartbreak, it shows us how to live within it.

Director: Andrew Durham
Writer: Andrew Durham
Starring: Scoot McNairy, Emilia Jones, Nessa Dougherty, Maria Bakalova, Adam Lambert, Geena Davis, and Cody Fern
Release Date: Oct. 10

Audrey Weisburd is an arts and culture writer from Austin, Texas, currently living in Brooklyn. She also writes short fiction and poetry. She shares her work on instagram @audrey.valentine.