Tom Han­ks warms hearts in the A Beau­ti­ful Day in the Neigh­bor­hood trailer

Tom Han­ks spe­cial­izes in play­ing pater­nal fig­ures, the sorts of men that make a per­son feel like they’re in good hands. He’s saved lives as Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan​‘s army cap­tain, defend­ed the free­dom of the press as a news­pa­per edi­tor in The Post, and now, he’ll play the de fac­to dad to sev­er­al entire gen­er­a­tions of Americans.

The first trail­er for Marielle Heller​‘s Fred Rogers biopic A Beau­ti­ful Day in the Neigh­bor­hood has start­ed this week off on a heart­string-tug­ging note, with the public’s first sub­stan­tive look at a film guar­an­teed to put the thumb­screws to the audience’s sense of child­hood nos­tal­gia. It’s a pret­ty telling sign when you can feel your­self start­ing to mist up at what is essen­tial­ly a commercial.

Han­ks por­trays Rogers mid-career, at which point the children’s enter­tain­er and TV pio­neer had won a nation­wide fol­low­ing for his PBS pro­gram Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood. Like so many oth­er bio­graph­i­cal scripts look­ing for a nar­ra­tive way in, this film struc­tures itself around the inter­ac­tion between its sub­ject and a jour­nal­ist (Matthew Rhys, strug­gling to con­nect with his inner child) sent to fig­ure out what makes them tick.

Rogers melts the cold heart of his inter­view­er in the same way that his work con­tin­ues to dis­arm even the most jad­ed adults: with unflag­ging earnest­ness. Han­ks’ per­for­mance empha­sizes Rogers’ well-known rep­u­ta­tion as a patron saint of kind­ness, some­one will­ing to extend a warm hand and some com­fort­ing words to absolute­ly any­one in need of them.

One snip­pet of footage shows Han­ks’ Mis­ter Rogers embrac­ing a child con­nect­ed to an oxy­gen tank, which pos­es the ques­tion of whether there may be a point of dimin­ish­ing returns with all the pathos, but this film remains a key late-year release regard­less. Rolling out the trail­er not 24 hours before the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val makes their first pro­gram­ming announce­ment feels like a point­ed move, as if declar­ing the soft open­ing of an Oscar cam­paign sure to occu­py the rest of the year.

A Beau­ti­ful Day in the Neigh­bor­hood comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 22 Novem­ber, and then the UK on 6 December.