'First Man': As if you were there too

The star of Damien Chazelle, ruler of the Oscar-winning La La Land, just keeps rising. In First Man he has staged the moon landing and Neil Armstrong’s sadness that preceded it.

It is quite strange that it has taken almost fifty years to make a film about the American exploit par excellence, the first moon landing. As the title indicates, Damien Chazelle focuses almost exclusively on the story of the first person to walk on the moon: NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong.

Despite his world-famous one-liner (“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”), Armstrong was not a loquacious man. As a husband and a father, he was also very reserved and thus not the easiest person to love. He never recovered from the loss of his daughter and that may have played a role in his urge to be the first person to set foot on the moon. Ryan Gosling plays the part with his customary captivating silence.

It was certainly not a pleasure trip. And certainly not when you consider the technological and scientific challenges, the enormous efforts, the repeated failures, the considerable sacrifices, and the deadly victims. Chazelle focuses more on these than on the actual moon landing itself, and looks beyond the myth of the story. The Apollo 11 was a dreadful vehicle. Its triumph came at a heavy price and was by no means guaranteed.

That first step was preceded by many dark hours and Chazelle gives a fine and dramatic presentation without lapsing into insincere sentimentality, Wikipedia cinema, heroic bombast, or patriotic flag-waving. You really believe what you see and hear. Chazelle tells both the little human story and the big revolutionary story at the same time. The focus alternates between the banal and the cosmic, but they never come apart. By keeping the most intimate moment for the moon walk itself, it is almost as if you and you alone were there too. Was Armstrong more human on the moon than he was on earth? It is not so very unlikely.