Kritiken

His [Chazelle’s] take on Neil Armstrong’s voyage was never going to be a middle-of-the-road affair: Instead he crafted a masterfully staged re-creation of the space program with utterly compelling physical detail and layers of cinematic immersion that command credence and ensure that the radical and intensively subjective nature of Chazelle’s point-of-view comes as a gradually unveiled shock.

Ryan Gosling’s Armstrong may be frustratingly taciturn, and he may hold the center of the film as an indomitable genius of engineering and piloting savvy. But First Man isn’t a naked ode to that genius; it’s a fascinating study of the costs.

Armstrong’s historic achievement, too, is reductively articulated in terms of a significant personal event and reckoning, limited, like the field of vision aboard a spacecraft, to a single potent explanation.

Is it the implied male hero-worship that rankles my ear? The notion that being first and being a man are irrevocably bound? The Adamic association? The implication that men were not men before men were in space? The echo of manifest destiny?

The film’s greatest shortcoming is that Armstrong never emerges as a compelling figure. Like all of Chazelle’s protagonists to date, he’s smart, ambitious, and emotionally dull—the only thing that seems to stand in the way of his being a perfect person is his repressive nature, but even this doesn’t register as much of a hurdle.

It’s not a film about victory — Pyrrhic or any other kind. This non-celebratory “history” is as disaffected as Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and similarly misuses the towering IMAX screen to be unimpressive. When Chazelle finally reveals the lunar surface, the landscape is not eerily still, but banal: The screen’s breadth portrays anonymity or claustrophobia inside the space capsule.

It is hard to tell if First Man is nostalgic for this kind of family life, criticizing it, or simply noting it. The film is severe and de-dramatized.

If you want to get an almost first-person sense of what it felt like to fly in one of the earliest supersonic planes or ride a rocket into orbit and beyond, "First Man" is the movie to see. . . . It makes the experience seem more wild and scary than grand, like being in the cab of a runaway truck as it smashes through a guardrail and tumbles down the side of a mountain.

Chazelle and Singer have created a grueling, prosaic, state-of-the-art docudrama (no imagination allowed) with the heart of a male weepie. And Gosling has responded with a virtuosic display of sensitive-guy emotions, so even when he’s infuriatingly recessive with his wife Janet (Claire Foy) . . . we’re encouraged to feel as if no one could be suffering more nobly.

First Man’s script was adapted from Hansen’s biography by Josh Singer, who also had a hand in the screenplays of both Spotlight and The Post. Those talky, well-populated films felt embedded in their historical moment in a way the much more intimate and sparsely written First Man doesn’t. Though it takes place in between 1961 and 1969, the social upheaval of those years is almost invisible from the screen.

It gets almost everything right, but it’s also strangely underwhelming. It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment — into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination — that the film is too careful, too earthbound, to attempt.

“First Man” is worthy of enduring as a right-wing fetish object. It is a film of deluded, cultish longing for an earlier era of American life, one defined not by conservative politics but, rather, by a narrow and regressive emotional perspective that shapes and distorts the substance of the film.