In “Bridge of Spies,” a gravely moody, perfectly directed thriller, Steven Spielberg returns you to the good old bad days of the Cold War and its great fictions, with their bottomless political chasms and moral gray areas. With a story that has been plucked from the historical record, given a nice dusting and a little sweetening, the movie centers on a 1962 spy swap involving a Soviet mole, Rudolf Abel; an American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, shot down by the Soviets; and an American student, Frederic L. Pryor, who had ended up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall at the worst possible time. All were chess pieces in a ghastly game that, the film balefully suggests, continues without end.

Opening in 1957, when the Cold War was atomically hot, “Bridge of Spies” offers up a world of shadows and the men who haunt them for country, company (as in C.I.A.) and ideology. Like some of Mr. Spielberg’s other recent movies, notably “Lincoln” and “Munich,” this one is a meticulously detailed period piece that revisits the anxieties of the past while also speaking to those of the present. Yet it also feels lighter than those films, less weighted down by accreted history or maybe by a sense of duty to its significance. There are still stirring speeches and swells of important music – this is Steven Spielberg – yet for all the darkness there is also laughter, which finally may be the only reasonable response to the specter of worldwide nuclear annihilation.