1964-1969. Brought up in the New York suburb of New Rochelle, Frank W. Abagnale Jr is the teenage son of businessman and small-time con artist Frank Sr and beautiful French woman Paula. The bottom falls out of Frank's world when his parents divorce and his father faces severe financial problems due to a dispute with the IRS.

Leaving home for New York City, Frank Jr discovers that by impersonating an airline pilot, he can more easily persuade banks to cash his fraudulent cheques. Hoodwinking the airlines, he flies all over the country, leaving huge debts behind him. Carl Hanratty, a dour FBI agent specialising in fraud, is in pursuit of him. When Hanratty tracks him down in Los Angeles, Frank tricks him by pretending he's a law enforcement officer and escapes.

Frank now decides to reinvent himself as a doctor. Forging his credentials, he finds a senior position at an Atlanta hospital. Here, he becomes attracted to Brenda, an ingenuous young nurse who has been kicked out of her home by her conservative parents for having an abortion. He accompanies her to her home in New Orleans. Her wealthy lawyer father takes Frank into the bosom of the family. Frank passes his law exams and joins the family law firm. On the eve of his marriage, Frank is again tracked down by Hanratty. He escapes and flees to France where he continues to earn a living through forgery. Hanratty pursues him, finally arrests him and takes him back to the US, where he is sent to prison. Realising his unusual abilities, Hanratty gets Frank out of jail to work for the FBI's fraud squad.

Shot in barely two months and released when Minority Report is barely out of the cinemas, Catch Me If You Can is a reminder of how quickly Steven Spielberg is capable of working. By comparison with most of his recent features, it's a modestly mounted affair: no detailed recreations of the D-Day landings or computer-generated visions of the future here. The challenge instead—one which he and his crew rise to with considerable flair—is to evoke 1960s middle-class America, a world seemingly peopled exclusively by clean-cut bankers, lawyers, doctors and airline pilots. Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale, the teenage conman who leaves a trail of forged cheques as he jets across the US, may let his hair grow after he absconds to France in the late 1960s, but otherwise there's little hint of the turmoil of the era.

The sprightly, Saul Bass-like credit sequence sets the tone for what follows. Like Frank himself, Catch Me If You Can is restless and playful, forever trying out new styles; and by using multiple flashbacks and framing devices, the script by Jeff Nathanson avoids the straitjacket of chronology. Thanks to Janusz Kaminski's wonderfully inventive cinematography—with its high-angle shots of DiCaprio lost in the crowds, its rich, dark interiors of prestigious banks and its garishly bright Californian scenes—the film is visually arresting. Even the score by composer John Williams—best known for his more solemn and pompous work—is nimble and jazzy.

DiCaprio excels as the epicene, chameleon-like young pretender who effortlessly takes on new guises. As the credulity of those he encounters underlines, if you're white, middle-class, good-looking and well-dressed, you can hoodwink anyone. Showing an unlikely aptitude for comedy, Spielberg throws in some bawdy slapstick sequences: Frank—passing himself off as the head of an emergency room—throwing up after seeing a patient's bloody wound; or energetically making love to an air hostess as the crockery rattles beside him; or propositioning a model, paying for her services with a dud cheque—and getting change.

In the initial scenes at least, there is little moralising: Frank is a charming rogue, and we're invited to admire his chutzpah. What's intriguing (and a little dispiriting) is how the film subtly shifts gear as the director begins to hone in on his pet themes. On one level, Frank is a counterpart to Haley Joel Osment's android child in A.I., an idealistic youngster in search of a father or mother figure. In the mawkish Christmas Eve scenes when he telephones the FBI officer pursuing him (because he has “nobody else to call”) he seems the latest in a line of Spielberg's little boys lost. His encounters here with his father (played with seedy grandeur by Christopher Walken) are rife with a sense of pathos and anti-climax: Frank Jr is the errant son who hopes through his ingenious con tricks to impress his father, but Frank Sr is too swallowed up with self-pity to pay much attention.

What's most grating about Catch Me If You Can is the characterisation of Carl Hanratty, the stolid, overweight FBI man in pursuit of Frank Jr. With his humourless approach, he seems at first to represent all that is wrong and repressive about the establishment. (The only time we see him when he's not working is at the launderette, watching his clothes spin round.) Salieri to Frank's Mozart, Carl is an embittered figure who—one guesses—would love to swap places with him if only he had the wit to do so. Gradually, though, he becomes more sympathetic and by the final reel he has somehow turned into the father figure that Frank Jr was looking for.

In most films which pit lawless, free spirits like Frank against ‘the system’, there's bound to be a bad ending: Billy the Kid will be shot by Pat Garrett; R. P. McMurphy will lose his battle of wills with Nurse Ratched; and so on. In Laurent Cantet's recent Time Out, when the unemployed businessman who's invented a shadow life for himself is forced to go back to work, it is presented as the ultimate defeat. Here, though, Frank is supposed to welcome the chance Hanratty gives him to lead a desk-bound life as a fraud-buster. This may be true to Abagnale's memoir but it runs against the grain of everything we've learned about him so far. It's perverse (but perhaps predictable) of Spielberg to try to turn his defeat into a happy ending, and to take the side of the establishment. This final reel strikes a false note in what is otherwise among the director's most quicksilver (and least bombastic) movies—and one which proves how well he can work with actors when he leaves the gadgets aside.