Childhood idealization plays an important part in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!, which is something aging, jaded film buffs (like myself) can identify with, because we all remember the pure thrill of being transported by fantasy into another world, even if that experience sometimes seems lost to us.

Good Bye, Lenin!—sometimes moving, sometimes comic—takes place over the year spanning the collapse of the communist powers and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The politics of the moment, however, are pushed far into the background. The conceit of the film is that Alex (Daniel Bruhl), a young East Berliner whose family was abandoned by its father in his childhood, believes he must keep his mother Christiane (Katrin Sass), who spends the pivotal months of late 1989 to early 1990 in a coma, from learning of the collapse of her beloved state, for fear the shock would be fatal. This leads to an elaborate effort on Alex’s part, with the more or less reluctant aid of friends and family, to keep the GDR alive, if only as far as his the edges of his mother’s shrunken universe. Particularly funny scenes involve Alex’s new Western friend Denis (Florian Lukas), an aspiring filmmaker who plunges into the idea of recreating the fallen East with gleeful abandon. And as the new world order encroaches on the last living relic of the GDR, it is often painfully hilarious to watch Alex struggle to keep it out.

Good Bye, Lenin! is not merely farcical: Alex’s motives go beyond the salvation of his mother. The feelings of loss and tempestuous storm of the period awaken in him a youthful idealism, and the world he attempts to recreate for his mother is not the world she knew, but a better, happier one. It is this, perhaps, that makes Alex so sympathetic even as his efforts grow increasingly desperate and even foolish. Alex is selfish, but not malicious; his love extends beyond his mother to an unrequited love for a country (and a father) that let him down, so he reinvents it as a form less of homage than of solace.

Bruhl does a masterful job at balancing the competing comic and dramatic needs of the story. The farcical aspects are grounded by his determinedly serious desire to keep his mother blissfully unaware, and his open, honest expressions give the drama additional weight. Becker’s direction is equally up to handling a story that is emotionally all over the map; he has a keen instinct for when to play up the moment, comedic or dramatic. The film suffers slightly toward the end from Alex overplaying his hand—and to an extent, the film doing the same—but not enough to detract from an experience that, in its own strange way, is a trip through a simpler time.