Visceral drama imbued with a sense of wonder

Rating: 9/10 (16 October 2018)

First Man is a triumph. As a warts-and-all biopic of Neil Armstrong, detailing the most important part of his life, I can only speculate as to its authenticity. The main problem with biopics, it seems to me, is that unless there is documented evidence of that person's innermost feelings, it's effectively just guesswork. That's where the drama comes in. What makes a great story like the US/USSR space race come alive is the impact it had on the lives of those most intimately involved. There's little risk of getting it wrong in speculating how a man might feel over the premature death of his young daughter from cancer, or surviving a near-death experience of his own; the emotional strains these things would place on his relationships with family and friends. No, the real strength of this story is not so much laying bare the soul of Neil Armstrong as using his personal experiences to allow us on board the space race itself. Having said that, magnificent though the depictions of NASA's endeavours are in First Man, the main cast really bring it to life and invest the story with a sense of purpose. No one conveys emotional depth through silences better than Ryan Gosling, and Claire Foy was wonderful as the worried wife pushed close to the edge of endurance by the risks her husband was taking, and the emotional distance he kept, seemingly as armour against allowing himself to give up.
Where First Man really ups the ante is in the NASA development testing events, when things went wrong. The accidents in which Neil Armstrong was personally involved were conveyed on the big screen with gut-churning intensity; there's no doubting his courage and coolness under pressure, to be able to think and perform his way out of certain death in those situations. Damien Chazelle's direction places the viewer in the cockpit with Armstrong; you effectively become him at key moments. This intensity is aided and abetted by a superb soundtrack of music and sound effects, the like of which I can't recall experiencing since Interstellar.
The icing on the directorial cake is the 1969 moon landing itself; the way it is done actually creates the sense of wonder and awe which I feel would have been experienced at the time it happened; there is absolutely no feeling of anti-climax as Armstrong and Aldrin step out onto the lunar surface and take it all in. Magnificent.