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Good start, but then it gets ruined

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

This is a family film in more ways than one. The Dirksens are dairy farmers in Indiana. Dairy farming is a family affair, a year-round, never-a-day-off occupation. Dairy farmers get no vacation. Imagine if one day you found a couple small airplanes had landed in your alfalfa field. Alfalfa is a cash crop in the sense that it's feed for your dairy cattle, and alfalfa doesn't abide traffic. Two pilots, Andrew King and Frank Pavliga, who like to perpetuate the barnstorming tradition, and who landed merely to take photographs, might have had reason to be apprehensive when they spied the farmer's pick-up coming toward them. But Farmer Dirksen was not upset. He, and the two young sons with him, were intrigued by the airplanes. The barnstormers relaxed. They gave the boys rides. It turned into an annual affair, and the barnstormers became like family to the Dirksens. As the family grew, so did the annual air show. By the time this documentary was made, nine years later, antique cars were added, with food and entertainment; and the event became a town picnic with a crowd in the hundreds...and still on the Dirksen farm. For the children, the anticipation of airplanes landing in your field once each summer to put on a show and give you rides just might be bigger than anticipating Santa Claus. Americana survives!