By Michael Phillips

There’s enough going on in director Damien Chazelle’s tense, distinctive Neil Armstrong biopic, “First Man,” to leave the climactic, inspired Apollo 11 moon landing sequence aside for a few paragraphs. So hang in there, please, and we’ll get to the damn flag.

“First Man” comes from the James R. Hansen biography of the same name, exploring the far reaches of uncharted territory. The lunar mission, yes, of course. But really Chazelle’s film, written by Josh Singer (“Spotlight,” “The Post”) has its hands and its interests full with prying open, tactfully, the clam that was Armstrong, a famously tight-lipped aeronautical engineer and history-maker.

Ryan Gosling is an apt choice for this role, though he has to work hard at seeming like a regular Joe, even an emotionally bottled-up regular Joe. The actor’s air of vaguely imperious, sphinx-y cool doesn’t easily accommodate conventional, overt heroics. This is also why the casting basically works (better overall, I’d say, than in Chazelle’s previous film, “La La Land”). Chazelle doesn’t use Armstrong’s achievement to make an America First public-service message. Rather, “First Man” prioritizes the sheer, deafening mechanics of each flight, every orbit and the succession of risky missions. The claustrophobic experience of being inside aircraft and spacecraft in one lifeand-death scenario after another: That’s the movie you get here, built around a private man.

It’s not Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13,” in other words.“That film, rousing and satisfying, got more feelgood feels out of a rescue mission than “First Man“gets out of a climactic mission that required no rescuing. En route to that climax, Chazelle returns cyclically, methodically, to variations on two themes: getting “up there,” and making sense of Armstrong’s life, marriage and buried grief over the early death, from cancer, of

Associated Press This image released by Universal Pictures shows Ryan Gosling in a scene from “First Man.”