With the possible exception of Ryan Coogler, there isn’t a young director whose star is burning any brighter than Damien Chazelle’s, who was free to write his own check after coming one Beatty and Dunaway flub away from an almost-sweep at the 2017 Oscars. Check cashed, Chazelle immediately enlisted his “La La Land” lead, Ryan Gosling, to play the stoic and famously colorless Neil Armstrong in “First Man,” a period biopic set to open on October 12 (though it’ll premiere at the Venice Film Festival today).
Space dramas are a tough nut to crack, and for every “Apollo 13,” “Gravity,” “The Martian,” or even “Armageddon,” there’s a plethora of “Red Planet,” “Mission to Mars,” “Interstellar,” or “Space Cowboys” to muddy the waters. Indeed, the best acting and VFX in the world can’t save an undercooked script from drifting off into the gaping maw of space, so even a reteaming of Chazelle and Gosling isn’t a sure bet. Josh Singer, scribe of recent good-but-not-at-all-thrilling movies “Spotlight” and “The Post” is credited as the screenwriter, so only time will tell if the story transcends the paint-drying personality of the man front and center for all of this.
If anyone can pull this off, though, it is Gosling, who dazzled critics (though not studio accountants) in last year’s “Blade Runner 2049.” “First Man” won’t suffer from a lack of talent surrounding the guy, either, as the effort also features Claire Foy (“The Queen”), who has tossed aside her Received Pronunciation accent from Windsor Castle to affect an earthy mid-western U.S. one, here.
Foy and Gosling are hardly the only “gets” in this cast, though — having won his actors an Oscar in each of his last two pictures has given Chazelle a lot of casting juice. Pablo Schreiber (“Skyscraper” and “Den of Thieves”), Kyle Chandler (“Friday Night Lights” and “The Wolf of Wall Street”), Jason Clarke (“Everest” and “Mudbound”), and Corey Stoll (“House of Cards” and “Ant-Man”) are just a few of the supporting players. If Singer’s script and Gosling’s rendering of Armstrong’s less-than-peppy disposition keep people awake throughout “First Man,” it might just generate a little buzz come Oscar season. For the red-hot Chazelle, at least, anything less would be mission critical, and might force the young director to admit to Houston that he and his film have a problem.