“Fairyland,” the new film based on Alysia Abbott’s memoir about growing up in San Francisco raised by a gay single father, has its fair share of touching father-daughter moments. In one scene, a college-aged Alysia (played by Emilia Jones), returning from a semester abroad in France, shares a notebook of her writing with her dad Steve (played by Scoot McNairy), who is himself a poet. There’s something particularly raw and real about the scene — partly because it’s an actual notebook from Alysia’s youth.
“That was kind of my first writing about my life that would become part of the memoir,” Abbott told SFGATE.
The film, released in theaters on Oct. 10, is set in the 1970s and 1980s and begins with the death of Alysia’s mother and a move with her father to a bohemian apartment in San Francisco where Steve begins to date men. Alysia grows up in a fanciful version of the city, in which she plays dress-up with her father’s roommates and is taught a respect for the arts. But by the time she reaches young adulthood, the AIDS crisis has overwhelmed SF’s gay community, and she becomes a caregiver for her father…