Five Came Back is an irresistibly watchable and ebullient celebration of five remarkable Hollywood studio directors – William Wyler, Frank Capra, George Stevens, John Ford and John Huston – who tackled the second world war head on. These were the patriotic idealists who put their talents to work on the frontline, creating enlightened propaganda for Uncle Sam. It is a romantic story in its way, although one that sometimes succumbs to its own need for derring-do and self-mythologising. It’s almost like The Dirty Dozen (minus seven): a bunch of lovable mavericks teaming up to take a whack at Adolf. (The title also echoes a wartime survival melodrama of the period about passengers on a downed plane.)

Like many conventional histories of America’s entry into the war, Five Came Back can be naive about the nation’s supposed destiny and struggles to get to grips with the fact that, while anti-Nazi feeling was widespread in Hollywood and elsewhere, Hitler forced the issue himself by declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor; until then it was not inevitable that the US would choose to go to war with Germany as well as Japan. But Five Came Back is certainly timely and welcome, with its emphasis on how these five musketeers were fighting against isolation and cynicism, as exemplified by Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement.

Photograph: Netflix

The series, for Netflix, is narrated by Meryl Streep, an interesting counterweight to the maleness of it all; it is written by Mark Harris, adapted from his 2015 book Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. (Harris is also the author of a 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, a fascinating account of the birth pangs of the American new wave, told through the five best picture nominees of 1967. It seems that Harris works best within a structure of five.)

This film is the story of how these directors changed the war. It shows that some were all-American, some European émigrés or people with links to Europe and Britain, and so wanting to fight the fascists setting Europe ablaze. But it was the fact that they were movie directors that was important: they were natural leaders, autocratic and attuned to the field of battle. In that analogue age, movies were about marshalling huge numbers of people in actual spaces.

Each of these names is paired with a modern director, and the latter-day film-makers offer tremendously engaged and insightful comment: their cinephilia and admiration for these first-generation Hollywood masters lights up the screen. Steven Spielberg is matched to Wyler, Paul Greengrass to Ford, Guillermo del Toro to Capra, Francis Ford Coppola to Huston and Laurence Kasdan to Stevens. Greengrass is excellent on John Ford’s urgently on-the-spot documentary The Battle of Midway (1942), importantly shot in colour – a mode previously associated with musicals, comedies and escapist fun – and boldly foregrounding chaos, loss of focus, sprocket-jumps. As Greengrass says, it is “one of the most modern moments in cinema”.

William Wyler on set. Photograph: Netflix

George Stevens made films for the US Army Signal Corps and William Wyler made documentaries for the US Air Force but his home front feature Mrs Miniver was arguably far more important, a key text in rallying Americans around their great ancestor-allies, the Brits, no longer the haughty redcoat colonials but admirable stiff-upper-lip underdogs, holding firm against the Nazi blitzkrieg until they could be relieved by Roosevelt’s Seventh Cavalry.

Frank Capra, who had been tasked with creating the documentary series Why We Fight to boost US troop morale, had been stunned on first seeing Leni Riefenstahl’s undeniably impressive hate-ballet Triumph of the Will. “How can I possibly top this?” he asked. He felt intimidated as a film-maker, as well as queasy as a human being. But also a competitive spark – he could out-propaganda the Nazis. Five Came Back shows that he did it via a kind of film-maker’s jiu-jitsu: actually using the Nazi’s chilling power-worship footage, but making it look silly, cheap and ridiculous.

This is not a nuanced telling of of history, but the gung-ho spirit is part of its energy and charm.