With only four feature films to his name, director Damien Chazelle has become one of the most talked about filmmakers in Hollywood. His debut film, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, began as a thesis project before it eventually earned Chazelle his first taste of industry acclaim at its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009. It wasn’t until 2014 that Chazelle really hit it big, though, with his breakout film Whiplash. The film was a Best Picture nominee at the Academy Awards, where Chazelle also received his first Oscar nomination for screenwriting, and it went on to win three Oscars: for editing, sound mixing, and J.K. Simmons’ performance as a supporting actor.
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Chazelle followed up Whiplash with La La Land, his musical love letter to the films of classic Hollywood, two years later. The film was a massive success, pulling in nearly $450 million at the global box office and winning six Academy Awards (after being nominated for 14). La La Land shot Chazelle from an up-and-coming indie director to one of the hottest names in Hollywood. From there, he could have continued making musicals, hopped on board a big franchise, or made more general-audience-friendly flicks. Instead, he signed on to direct First Man, a biopic about the first person to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong. While the results were still positive, with the film receiving four Oscar nominations (all in technical categories) and winning the award for visual effects, audiences seem to have all but forgotten First Man in the nearly four years since its debut.
With Chazelle’s fifth film, Babylon, scheduled for release at the end of this year, now is a great time to revisit First Man. It might not have been as widely loved as Whiplash or La La Land upon its release, but Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic is another truly outstanding film in his career. From beginning to end, First Man is a masterclass in storytelling, performance and filmmaking. It’s easily the most underappreciated film of his career.
The Sound, Score and Cinematography
Universal Pictures
First Man makes excellent use of its audience’s senses, as it engulfs the viewer and plunges them into this story through an incredible soundscape and visual artistry to match. The cinematography from Linus Sandgren is impeccable, as it perfectly encapsulates so many different perspectives throughout the film. In moments when Armstrong is home with his family, a handheld camera was used to make the scenes feel more personal, almost like home videos. Whereas the various flight sequences in the film capture the wonder of flight and space through the use of color and scale. There’s a balance to the beauty though, as those same flight scenes are also immensely claustrophobic and anxiety-inducing as the camera follows these men into tiny metal can with little separating them from the void.
The sound design and mixing also does a lot of the heavy lifting in these scenes as well, as the deafening sound of the metal rattling, bending and expanding really puts the viewer in the same head space as Armstrong. It’s overwhelming, and deliberately so. It adds to the intensity of the sequences and pulls the audience into the same adrenaline rush as the characters in the film. The music of the film also adds a lot to First Man, as the score from Justin Hurwitz borrows a lot from both classical music and the sci-fi soundscapes of the 1950s and 60s. The central piano-led ballad of the film is beautifully composed, as it takes the subtle emotions Armstrong is experiencing and communicates them to the audience solely through music. On top of that, Hurwitz uses a theremin throughout much of the score, evoking similar aesthetics to early science-fiction films. Although theremins are often used to add a mysterious or futuristic aura to a film, Hurwitz uses the instrument to excellent effect by playing the same central musical themes and motifs of the film on it. He’s able to use the theremin to add to the emotional weight of the music, rather than just injecting strange or random sci-fi noises into the score.
Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong
Ryan Gosling is not the type of actor that you would typically expect to see in a role like this. He usually takes on much more charismatic or exciting roles, rather than the more subdued and soft-spoken characters like Armstrong. That’s not a knock against Gosling’s previous works (his performance in The Nice Guys is next-level hilarious), but it was certainly surprising to say the least when he was cast in this film. While these roles may not be the usual for Gosling, maybe they should be, as the performance he delivers in First Man might be one of the best of his career.
A character as straight-faced as Armstrong in this film can be very difficult to make work on screen, especially in a leading role. But Gosling perfectly embodies all the nuance and subtlety needed to make this character and movie work. He’s quiet, but when he does speak he firmly makes his point. So much of the emotion behind Armstrong in First Man goes unspoken, and it is only conveyed to the audience through the small glimmers of thought on his face. In a year when Christian Bale was nominated for Vice and Rami Malek won the lead actor Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s a crime that Gosling got overlooked for even a nomination for First Man. This movie rested on his shoulders, and he delivered with a performance for the ages.
That’s not even to mention the rest of the cast, who do an excellent job of bringing the whole hectic and determined nature of 1960s Texas and the Space Race to life. Claire Foy anchors the film as Janet Armstrong, who is forced to confront many of the complicated emotional situations that her husband seems to be avoiding, while the rest of the supporting cast consists of Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke, Corey Stoll, Ciarán Hinds and Christopher Abbot.
Powerful, Character-Driven Story
With a story as dramatic as the first trip to the moon, it would be easy to focus solely on the grandiosity of such a venture and the danger that comes with it. While First Man does have plenty of awe-inspiring space and flight sequences, the core of the film’s story is Armstrong as a person. The film depicts him as a very reserved individual who buries his emotions and focuses on the task at hand, even if doing so affects his relationships with his family and friends. He emotionally walls himself off from everybody, which in turn makes him a bit of a mystery. The people around him, as well as the film’s audience, have a hard time figuring him out. His blunt determination and seeming lack of expression makes him a bit of a mystery.
While centering a story on a character like that could easily make for a very stagnant and uninteresting film, First Man occasionally peels back the curtain to reveal the man behind Armstrong’s unreadable exterior. Through showing Armstrong in his personal moments, when he has isolated himself and finally allowed his emotions to come out, the film establishes him as a person who is scared and in pain. Much of this emotion is attributed to the tragic passing of Armstrong’s two-year-old daughter in the early 1960s. Instead of taking the time to process his pain and emotions after such a loss, First Man shows how he chose to suppress many of those feelings and pour everything he had into his work with NASA. While he never comes out and says so outright, the feeling is that he saw his work as a way to honor his daughter, which is built upon even further in the film’s final act by him taking her bracelet with him to the moon and leaving it there in tribute to her memory. While the character of Neil Armstrong in First Man may not be as charismatic or stoic of a lead character as audiences may be used to in movies like this, the subtlety and reserve of his emotional arc in the film is incredibly moving and nothing short of exceptional.
