In their follow-up to 2016's hit musical "La La Land," Ryan Gosling and director Damien Chazelle reunite for "First Man," the story of Neil Armstrong's pioneering moon landing in 1969. Though Gosling plays the lead, it's Chazelle _ the youngest person to win a directing Oscar _ who proves the star attraction. With dazzling effects, teeth-rattling audio and austerely beautiful lunar landscapes, "First Man" virtually teleports us back to the perilous early days of the space race. The sealed-off, nearly silent Armstrong, however, leaves an emotional vacuum in the film's center.
Gosling plays Armstrong as a bygone kind of American: short hair, few words. By comparison, taciturn Apollo 1 crewman Ed White (Jason Clarke) seems like a veritable chatterbox and the less-than-diplomatic Buzz Aldrin (an amusing Corey Stoll) seems almost unbearable. In backyard barbecue scenes as authentic as your grandparents' photo album ("First Man" was shot on grainy, honest-to-God film), the husbands and wives self-segregate for casual beers and sympathetic ears, respectively.
"First Man" excels at setting time, place and mood. Kyle Chandler and Ciaran Hinds, as stressed-out NASA honchos, signal just how many question marks hovered over each mission, while Claire Foy, in a small but crucial role as Armstrong's wife, Janet, does her best to keep her house, marriage and two children functioning normally. Still, it's the movie's technological details _ the flimsy-looking spacecraft, the clunky-looking gauges _ that remind us how relatively primitive space travel was in a hand-tooled, pre-computer decade.
