One giant leap of faith

Astronaut’s story demands a big picture view of life, and this movie delivers

ANYONE under the illusion that space travel is a smooth, glamorous business is quickly disabused of the notion in Damien

Chazelle’s enthralling biographical drama about Neil Armstrong. Indeed, such is the number of scenes featuring characters being tossed around like tin cans in a tumble dryer, and upchucking later, you might want to eat after rather than before the cinema.

When we meet Armstrong (played by Ryan Gosling, who also starred in Chazelle’s six Oscar-winning La La Land), he is a test pilot attempting to reach the stratosphere. Once there, the light and silence are heavenly. It is the getting there that is hellish.

Armstrong’s ability to keep calm and carry on even when disaster looms has earned him a reputation among colleagues as a fine engineer. Outside of the cockpit, though, he seems distracted, as though his mind is elsewhere. It is. His baby daughter, Karen, is sick and Armstrong and his wife Janet (Claire Foy) are terrified of losing her.

In time, Armstrong applies to be part of the US astronaut programme and the family moves to Houston. Chazelle, intercutting the drama with Nasa public information films of the time, captures those heady days well. With the Soviets winning the space race to date, Nasa is under pressure to achieve the greatest goal of all: putting a man on the Moon.

Based on the book by James R Hansen, First Man takes an admirably clear-eyed view of just what an epic struggle lay behind that one small step of Armstrong’s. Blood, sweat, tears and vomit is just the half of it. There were greater costs of the kind that cannot be measured in dollars, though the programme burned through plenty of those as well, much to the irritation of those who failed to see the point of going into space when so much still needed to be done on Earth.

As Chazelle shows, the space programme was a marriage of high-tech science and good old spit and sawdust. In one scene, astronauts are squeezed into a capsule held together with what look like cracked bolts and rust. There’s a problem with a seatbelt. “Anyone got a Swiss army knife?” shouts one of the crew. In every way, these were men