Flushed down the toilet, bagged and left for disposal; these are the fates that wait for us all, the possessions that once marked our lives seen finally as impositions to be packed away in dusty boxes marked – if we are lucky – ‘Dad’.

“You’ll be able to go home” is the nicest way a doctor can give the worst possible news. “You don’t have to come in for any more treatments” is another. Here is a love story, principally of a son, entwined with reflections of an undiscovered father. Hal was married for 44 years, then widowed, only to emerge from the closet a 75 year-old gay man. He returns home from a nightclub, a stranger in foreign lands, and excitedly phones his son to ask what the dum-tsch dum-tsch music was. “House music? Ahh”, he smiles, making himself a note.

This is all in the past, because Hal is dead. The present concerns itself with his son, Oliver, and Anna. They meet by chance at a costume party. He comes as Sigmund Freud; she drapes herself onto his makeshift couch, the most adorable Chaplin you ever saw. Perhaps it’s her eyes, or that she has laryngitis and can’t talk, so has to write everything down. The light flickers over her delicate features as she lifts her head. “Why are you at a party if you’re sad?” the scribble on her notepad reads. It sounds twee, and it is. It’s also silly and fun and everything Chaplin himself would have applauded.

Young love is no time for cynicism. It’s a time for interlocked fingers and long walks through the autumn leaves. Oliver and Anna so conduct themselves, primarily in the hotel rooms she frequents for work. The young actress soon regains the power of speech, and they begin to talk of the past and how it brought them here. For Oliver, that means his father, to whom Beginners returns frequently. Flashbacks alternate between memories of his childhood, in which Hal was an absent figure, and the years just gone, in which he was not. Newly awoken, he had no desire to be merely “theoretically gay”, and thus took to a new wardrobe and the crafting of a personal ad. “I’m an old senior guy, 78, but I’m attractive and horny. I have a nice house with food, drinks, friends and me. Let’s meet and see what happens”. A much-younger love, Andy, soon arrived, and was adored with a passion not wholly returned.

Director Mike Mills, best known for the intermittent Thumbsucker, places these relationships within a greater timeline. Images of the sun, of the people, of the news of the day. The death of Harvey Milk is set alongside 1950s housewives, or the golden era of the automobile. His show-and-tell of a bygone era is compared to our own fascinations, and such moments see Beginners try to understand our parents, and their parents, and parents before them, as just another fucked-up speck in an ever-expanding context.

Beginners is well-crafted in its use of repetition that draws us finally to a completed circle, in which characters are mirrored to one another, their lives compared and, finally, realised. Stage four cancer is no fit for the carefree adventurer Hal embodies, nor the thunder with which he approaches his new horizons. His son is witness to him finding love for the first time, which seems a strange thing to visit upon your grown child. Oliver’s own relationship ebbs and flows, and only his dog stays true, with eyes that go on forever and love him despite everything. He and Anna skate across a marble floor with that dog in-tow, his little legs all a blur, on their way to adventures of the independent kind, in which they must grow and discover in the most unassuming of ways. That’s okay: Beginners makes that routine seem thrilling, modestly.