How about some real-life stories?

Richard E. Grant’s “Wah-Wah” has a special quality that is more compelling than it is good filmmaking: It’s true. A personal, only slightly fictionalized reminiscence of the 48-year-old actor’s childhood in Swaziland, it’s practically beat-for-beat testimony about growing up amid adulterous liaisons, inebriated screaming battles and other outpost follies of the British community in that former protectorate.

The movie, which opened two weeks ago, follows the unembellished example of “The Squid and the Whale,” Noah Baumbach’s Oscar-nominated account of the painful breakup of his family in 1970s New York. In these films, and surprisingly few others, the emotional chronicles of family life -- seen piercingly through the fog of time -- are presented with minimal fictional embroidery. Although Grant admits that 10 years of events were “concertina-ed” into the three years of this drama, every detail (including his father drunkenly chasing him around a pool, firing a gun) has been faithfully reproduced.

Yet personal memoirs -- so richly and enduringly explored in literature such as Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and Augusten Burroughs’ “Running With Scissors” -- are a rarity in the movies. Why aren’t filmmakers, our most vaunted storytellers, regaling us with the raw, unfiltered flow of their personal pasts?

Real life was the star attraction in the early days of moviemaking, when peep-show flicks showed mundane, everyday activities at a nickel a pop. But it soon gave way to melodramas, epics and comedy, and that unavoidable handicap of pure storytelling, the star system. American audiences wanted (or were programmed to want) recognizable celebrities playing heroic characters whose stories had happy endings. Movie reminiscences -- the better ones, certainly -- may be filled with the joys, disappointments and heartbreaks that are the essential building blocks of life. But they don’t make good popcorn movies.

Unlike fictional movies, or even movie biographies, films-as-memoir spring from a deeper groundwater. They gush up -- muddy, unfiltered and genuine -- directly from the soul. You are soaked in the poetics of firsthand confession, not the artistic detachment of normal drama. At times, there is a similar emotional purity in documentaries, but the person telling the story is usually in front of the camera, under someone else’s editorial control. The memoir is about the evolution of a living character, the one telling the story. As the Luftwaffe’s blitzkrieg rains over London in John Boorman’s autobiographical “Hope and Glory,” for example, a future artist is rising from the rubble: Boorman himself.

Other films like these that are worth revisiting seem to come from outside Hollywood. European filmmakers have been fairly prodigious over the years in putting their own stories on the screen, most notably Francois Truffaut (“The 400 Blows”), Louis Malle (“Au Revoir les Enfants”) and Lasse Hallstrom (“My Life as a Dog”). Woody Allen has made a career away from Tinseltown with such largely autobiographical works as “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan” and “Radio Days.” Barry Levinson’s autobiographical 1982 film “Diner,” a nostalgic recalling of life in 1950s Baltimore, and his 1990 family saga, “Avalon,” were independent affairs that chronicled his earlier years. And Kevin Smith credit-carded 1994’s “Clerks” so he could render his New Jersey adolescence just the way he remembered it: funny, ironic and peppered with graphic language.

But why should these films be so few and far between? Given Americans’ obsessions with themselves in blogs, webcams and personal websites, and the popularity of unscripted TV shows (featuring unknowns performing banal, everyday activities), it doesn’t seem farfetched to suggest that moviegoers are seeking an intimate, direct experience not found in star-driven summer schlock.

Let’s go one step further: Maybe people are interested in -- drum roll, please -- real people. And maybe individually oriented true stories, free of stars but full of rich incident, could be successful.