First Man Review

The opening puts us inside an X-15 cockpit with the panel rattling and the sky going black at the edges of the frame, and the next two hours refuse to leave that point of view. Linus Sandgren shot most of the film on grainy 16mm, handheld, close enough to Ryan Gosling's face that the Gemini 8 spin becomes a matter of gauges and a tightening jaw rather than a spectacle. Then Armstrong steps onto the lunar surface, the image opens out into 65mm IMAX, and the soundtrack drops to nothing but breathing.

That cut earns everything before it. Gosling plays Neil Armstrong as a man who has sealed himself shut, which matches the historical record and is also a hard thing to sit with for 141 minutes. Claire Foy does the load bearing work, and her scene cutting the squawk box feed and forcing Deke Slayton to admit that nobody is in control is the best acting here. The invented moment at Little West Crater with Karen's bracelet is a screenwriter's device wearing the clothes of history, and it strains hardest in exactly the place where the film has been most rigorous about the limits of what anyone can know.