It's brilliant, really. What's the quickest way to establish the humanity of two leading characters in a Cold War drama? Give them both the sniffles.

“Bridge of Spies” does that, and more. The film is an anomaly — a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol.

The trailers for director Steven Spielberg's first film since 2012's “Lincoln” aren't quite telling the truth. They promise a ridiculous degree of screw-tightening suspense amid imminent global destruction. The movie's narrative (more or less true) contains those elements, but sparingly.

Spielberg, a filmmaker in love with the ravishing fakery of the movies he watched as a kid, adapted freely from the historical record. As such, “Bridge of Spies” honors the righteous underdog, triumphant.

Tom Hanks stars as James Donovan, a Brooklyn, N.Y., insurance claims lawyer and former Nuremberg trials prosecutor. Not that many knew about it at the time, but Donovan negotiated a tricky exchange of Soviet and American spies: KGB mole Rudolf Abel (born Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher), captured in New York in 1957, as a trade for the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, shot down over the USSR in 1960 and captured.

On his own initiative, Donovan rolled a third man into the trade. American doctoral candidate Frederic Pryor was picked up and detained on the hostile side of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Two Americans, Powers and the forgotten Pryor, for Abel: Could the right negotiator pull off such a lopsided trade?

Hanks' performance makes relaxed professionalism and genial decency look easy. The role is what it is: an exemplar of homespun virtues, an Everyman with a patient, stalwart wife (Amy Ryan, reliably fine) with kids. Donovan is not larger than life; he's an ordinary hero with the sniffles, Capraesque to the core if Capra had ever made a Cold War spy picture.

Because he's relatively new to multiplex audiences, Mark Rylance will likely walk off with acting honors. He looks nothing like the real Abel, but in a largely nonverbal, supremely poker-faced performance, Rylance suggests a forlorn practitioner of deception who recognizes a lucky break when he sees it.

“Bridge of Spies” can be characterized as championing a cause beyond freedom, it argues implicitly for humane treatment of prisoners — foreign and domestic.

Michael Phillips is a film critic for the Chicago Tribune.

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