Author: Josh Singer / Source: New York Times
In July of 1969, as the world’s attention was fixed on the spectacle of the first lunar landing, news broadcasts would sometimes flash back to a speech given by President John F. Kennedy earlier in the decade. In effect writing the check that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would cash a half-dozen years after his death, Kennedy vowed to send astronauts to the moon “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
”A clip of that speech appears near the end of “First Man,” Damien Chazelle’s sweeping and intimate new film, which takes the conquest of difficulty as both theme and inspiration. Retelling the story of the American space program from the early ’60s to the Apollo 11 mission through the lens of Armstrong’s professional and personal life, Chazelle (drawing on James R. Hansen’s biography) unfurls a chronicle of setbacks, obstacles and tragedies on the way to eventual triumph.
It can be hard, almost 50 years later, to appreciate how many times, and in how many ways, the moon landing almost didn’t happen. Not only that: We might think we’ve seen it all before. “First Man,” its ending spoiled in advance, tries to restore a sense of uncertainty, of contingency, of the vast unknown that Armstrong and his colleagues faced. It also tries to find a fresh set of images (in IMAX, no less) to convey the strangeness and sublimity of those moments at Tranquility Base just after the “giant leap,” so we might intuit at least a glimmer of the awe that Armstrong must have felt.
All of this is a daunting challenge — nowhere near as perilous or costly as Apollo itself, of course, but in its way a mirror of that undertaking. Chazelle is an ambitious filmmaker who makes films about ambition. His recent features constitute a kind of trilogy on the subject, each one larger in scale and grander in scope than the one before.
“Whiplash,” “La La Land” and now “First Man” all concern a young or youngish man’s hunger for greatness, and suggest a developmental sequence, for both the archetypal character and for the director. The fledgling drummer played by Miles Teller in “Whiplash” (2014), defined by his aggressive competitiveness and his struggle with a demanding mentor, gives way, two years later, to the pianist (Ryan Gosling) in “La La Land” who navigates his own career in the context of a romantic partnership and professional rivalry with an equally driven artist (Emma Stone). Armstrong, a husband and father embedded in an organization that rewards both individual initiative and regimental discipline, completes the sequence.
“First Man,” with Gosling as Armstrong (and a script by Josh Singer, who wrote “Spotlight” and “The Post”), is also the portrait of a career, as well as — a bravura act of careerism. I don’t mean that dismissively. Chazelle, already the youngest winner of an Oscar for directing, has always set his sights on the Hollywood mainstream. Like “La La Land,” which set out to re-energize the apparently antiquated genre of the musical, “First Man” is at once knowingly old-fashioned and shrewdly up-to-date.
Its nostalgia — for a suburban, middle-class social order of crew-cut dads, stay-at-home moms, station wagons and cigarettes, and also for idealistic, robustly funded federal-government programs — is palpable. And yet Chazelle’s interest in Armstrong is as much personal as historical: bureaucratic snags, political-turf battles and engineering puzzles provide the narrative machinery, but feelings are the film’s…
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