As teenage con artist Frank Abagnale Jr., DiCaprio turned a true story of forgery and flight into a charming, surprisingly sad caper.
In Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002), Frank poses as a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer while still a teenager, always one step ahead of Tom Hanks’ FBI agent. DiCaprio makes the deceptions delightful, but he also lets the loneliness underneath show: a boy who has lost his family and keeps inventing new ones.
The performance is light on its feet and never loses its heart. It remains one of DiCaprio’s most purely enjoyable roles, and a reminder of how easily he could carry a film on charm alone.
Image credit: Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.