More than just catnip for Trekkies. It’s also an often painful examination of the rocky father/son relationship that existed between filmmaker Adam Nimoy and his famous father, Leonard.

The movie will disappoint basement-dwellers who worried a female-centric Ghostbusters would somehow ruin their childhoods, because it isn’t bad enough to hate. But the film is an even bigger letdown for fans of Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon, who are forced to play most of this material straight, with no room for comic improvisation.

Here’s a documentary with plenty of courage in its convictions, and a teachable exercise about modern health problems.

The cinematography and direction are particularly compelling; the complicated sequences on the tight sets must have forced camera operators to play cinematic Twister in impossibly small corners.

Slick, silly and often extravagantly pretty, it’s a pastiche that threads a tricky needle, conveying the dual nature of cinema as an enchanting art form and a ruthless, rationalized industrial practice.

It’s ABOUT something, which has become a rarity in Hollywood pictures. Sometimes, the smallest stories cast the largest shadows.