Compelling.

First Man is a biographical portrait of a special man, Neil Armstrong.

Director Damien Chazelle used a mixture of three film formats in making the movie, hand held 16mm for some of the domestic scenes, 35mm and 65mm IMAX for the HD sections, including the heart-stopping image of the Apollo 11 attached to von Braun’s faultless Saturn V rocket on the Houston launchpad at night. The 16mm work captures the look and feel of 1960s American middle class domesticity well. The 65mm sections harken back to the 70mm film used in the big magazines attached to the Hasselblad 500EL used by the astronauts. (The wonderful moment when Mission Control reminds Armstrong of the correct exposure settings as he prepares to step on the moon is correctly repeated here).

Candidly, if you do not catch this movie in an IMAX theater then the effects of a launch – be it the earlier Gemini or the later Apollo capsules – will be lost. The raw violence as the rockets ignite at blast-off, the sheer physical terror from the unleashing of over 7 million pounds of thrust to release man from the powerful grasp of gravity, these are things which dictate IMAX technology.

Two aspects of this fine movie stand out.

One is Ryan Gosling’s rendering of Armstrong. While the natural tendency of American directors is to opt for sentimental schmalz in biopics, Chazelle largely avoids this temptation, opting for schmalz-lite in securing continuity through the repeated mention of the death of Armstrong’s daughter at a young age. Gosling shows us the man we so little knew. Self-effacing, tightly wound and, above all, very serious. This is a very serious movie in the best possible way. I would hate to think what Spielberg would have delivered, other than better returns for his investors and sales for the makers of Kleenex.

The other is the no-holds-barred renderings of the hardware. There’s nothing glossy or high-tech about the look here. These are machines clearly seen to be bolted together by hand, poorly finished and utterly functional in intent. You wonder, time and again, why parts are not falling off during the brutal first few minutes as von Braun’s fires of hell are unleashed below the occupants, mostly mere passengers with little control over their fate.

Other performances of mention are Corey Stoll’s Buzz Aldrin, ever spiky and opportunistic. Not a man you would have a beer with. And a low key yet courageous Claire Foy as Armstrong’s wife. As the widow of another of the astronauts reminds her, she could have married a dentist and, yes, he would always be home by 6pm. Not an option for this woman.

Catch First Man at your local IMAX soon because box office returns suggest that it will not be there long, the audience’s interest about as long as Americans’ attention span for the very short lived Apollo program which remains – after the Louisiana and Alaska Purchases – one of the most lucrative investments the US taxpayer ever made. Indeed, had Apollo not existed we would have no microchips today and you would not be reading this.

A note on Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who made it possible for Apollo to escape earth’s gravity. His biography is objectively reported by Wikipedia including much detail on his sordid past. The OSS, forerunner of the CIA, did a masterful job of snatching him from a defeated Germany in 1945 along with many of his scientists, beating the (presumably intoxicated) Russians to the punch. We got the A Team and they crafted the Saturn V. The Russians came later, copied our tactics, and got the B Team. (“Here’s the good news, Hans. You are being liberated. Here’s the bad news. Moscow.”) They never successfully fired their copy of the Saturn V. All four exploded on the launch pad. No moonwalk for Ivan.