First Man

FIRST MAN   ****

Damien Chazelle

2018

IDEA:  An account of the years in Neil Armstrong's life leading up to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

BLURB:  Gratifyingly resisting any impulse to simply relay historical information or lionize a famous public figure, First Man commits itself to invoking a cosmos of sensations – frightening, exhilarating, overwhelming – with Neil Armstrong as an embodied conduit. Chazelle channels his subjective, sensory experience(s) through a magisterial command of the medium’s formal properties, placing us inside clamorous cockpits, bombinating test vehicles, and even astronaut helmets, manipulating visual and acoustic space to thrillingly immersive perceptual effect. The film’s visceral emphasis on embodied experience is as much a self-justified experimental approach to this subject as it is a thematization of the story’s preoccupation with life, death, and the phenomenal. Subverting nationalist-historical narratives as well as aesthetic expectations, Chazelle foregrounds the unwieldy and precarious materiality of spacecraft to convey the danger, even folly, of interstellar flight. Propagandistic discourse is stripped away in favor of a representation of the space program as suicide mission, as a possibly preposterous boondoggle whose human risks outstrip its potential for scientific gain. Contextualized alongside the Vietnam War, First Man measures the defensibility of putting lives in jeopardy for questionable ends, and Chazelle takes every opportunity to conjure the magnitude and physical weight of this peril through rattling equipment, groaning metal, and the tension of bodies strapped inside the apparatuses constituted by them. 

Rocked by the tragedies that surround him, a series of shocks catalyzed by the loss of his daughter, and unable to easily communicate emotion, Gosling’s Armstrong is an unlikely biopic hero. For most of the film he is taciturn, sullen, even inscrutable; Singer’s script wisely homes in on his internal struggles, framing his missions through the unspeakably private rather than the mass-mediated, and the actor responds with a portrayal of anxious, guarded, but resolute obsession. Chazelle and Singer suggest that his quest to walk on the moon was as much motivated by any professional pride in country as it was by the desire to literally defy limits, to tempt and transcend death, to accomplish the impossible. To the degree any film reasonably could, First Man approximates the transgressive, masochistic thrill of this desire made historically manifest, allowing us to feel the dread and the excitement of flying so close to the void.