Review - First Man

Ryan Gosling is just ugly enough not to have to act. A more conventionally handsome performer – Armie Hammer, say, or Jon Hamm five years ago – couldn’t get away with scene after scene of blank expressions: it’d be too much like looking at a mannikin. But Gosling, while obviously a very attractive man, is just the right side of perfection to be both a major movie star and someone audiences can find things in when he’s seemingly giving nothing back.

For most of First Man, not giving back is the point. There’s little doubt that Neil Armstrong (Gosling) was a notoriously private man whose interior landscape was as unknowable as the Moon’s surface - a comparison this film does not avoid making. Which should make him an extremely frustrating subject for a biopic in 2018, at time when even superhero characters are required to have emotional complexity and an ability to speak about their feelings.

So for much of the film director Damien Chazelle indulges in some slight-of-hand, focusing on the general how rather than the specific why. It’s a smart move: his strongest achievement here is weighting down the ecstasy of achievement with the mundane hard work required to achieve it. Here space travel itself is a cramped, rickety, noisy hellride filmed almost entirely in extreme close-ups; few films have done this well at dramatising just how risky flight, let alone flying into space, can be. In space and at home, texture abounds, most of it down-to-earth. Armstrong is told he’ll be leading the flight to the moon in a bathroom; scientists smoke and write on chalkboards; when he’s not careening across the sky Armstrong leads a 60s suburban life full of backyards and barbeques.

The skill and steady authenticity with which this backdrop is painted makes the moments where the film tries to reconcile the 60s view of itself with today some of the films strongest. The moments where it breaks out of the traditional hero’s journey – protest songs about the wastefulness of space travel, the focus on Armstrong’s wife (Claire Foy) dealing with the constant danger of the Moon program and an emotionally absent husband – are when it feels freshest. They’re also, not coincidentally, the moments where the film’s shell of white-collar restraint cracks.

Gosling’s performance sets the tone and the tone is as far from emotional as you can get. Armstrong never lets anyone in – a moment where he briefly mentions his deceased daughter is seen by those around him as a major breakthrough – and while the basics of a personality are obvious (he dislikes boredom, is driven to succeed, did musical theatre at University and is annoyed by Buzz Aldrin’s constant failure to read the room), for much of the film Gosling portrays a man who may or may not be concealing hidden depths by concealing just about everything.

It’s on the moon that all this tension snaps. Chazelle’s earlier film Whiplash ended with an extended drum solo that was both a personal triumph for the lead and a way to release the tension that had been built up in the audience across the course of the film; here the silence and stillness of the moon achieves the same thing. Chazelle finds a way to give us the moment we demand - the point where Armstrong triumphs and in that moment is revealed to be as flawed and yearningly human as the rest of us – without revealing it. The demands of the story are met, yet Armstrong remains a blank slate.

There’s plenty to enjoy in this thrilling tale of the conquest of space. It’s brilliantly made, consistently gripping, and occasionally very funny; it’s an easy peer to previous classics The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, with a hefty dose of 2001’s awe mixed in. At its heart, it’s a very human tale of a man who rarely acted human at all; we can walk on the moon, but it’s knowing what’s inside another person’s head that remains the final frontier.

- Anthony Morris