Fairyland is a 2023 American coming-of-age drama written and directed by Andrew Durham (in his feature directorial debut) and based on Alysia Abbott’s memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. Sofia Coppola was initially to have co-written the screenplay with Durham, but in the end, Durham wrote it alone as he had a deep personal connection to the story. Coppola remained on board in the capacity of Producer. The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023, was released in the US last September, and was finally released in the UK today, 29 May 2026. It appears that the lengthy delay was partly due to extended administrative post-production work licensing historical archival footage, but mainly to difficulties in finding a major distributor.

Following the death of her mother in a car accident in 1973, Steve Abbott (Scoot McNairy) moves his young daughter Alysia (Nessa Dougherty) to San Francisco where he can live openly as a gay man. So far as Alysia is concerned, this was the first she knew of her father’s sexuality. Steve’s newly discovered freedoms are at odds with the expectations of parenthood, both from the outside world and from Alysia herself, who often finds the lack of parental control/support challenging. We move on through Alysia’s teenage years (now played by Emilia Jones) where we see that she is ashamed of her father and hides his sexuality from her friends, choosing to go to University in New York and in Paris rather than remain nearer home. The father/daughter bond is tested in painful and sudden ways, as people around them contract the AIDS virus, to which her father also falls victim.

Both Dougherty and Jones were excellent as Alysia, and her difficulties understanding and then accepting her situation and particularly her need for something more from her father came across well. However, whilst McNairy did well with the part as written for him, I felt it needed more substance and left him floundering a little. I also found the writing and direction rather pedestrian:  the structure was linear (as true stories so often seem to be) and the story just rumbled along to its inevitable conclusion. As a document of the bohemian life in San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, it was interesting, but it never had quite the power of Gus Van Sant’s 2008 film Milk.

Fairyland is a solid effort, and it deserves a thumbs up, hence the 3* review, however it lacks the originality and inventiveness in the storytelling which could have really brought it to life.