Ryan Gosling, Shawn Eric Jones, and Patrick Fugit in First Man (Universial Pictures )

Our friends on the Left are having some . . . interesting reactions to the Neil Armstrong drama First Man, which I call the best movie I’ve seen this year, even as I note that it is at pains to steer away from the triumphalism and nationalism of The Right Stuff. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody opines that First Man doesn’t have enough to say about racism: “Much of the action takes place in the Jim Crow states where public facilities were segregated, but there’s no hint of this in the film; there’s no hint of where Neil stands on the pressing questions of the time.” Brody adds that the film is equally silent about feminism. A female cosmonaut flew a space mission for the USSR in 1963 but the movie doesn’t tell us how Armstrong felt about that.


Thelma Adams (whom I’ve known and liked for more than 20 years) strikes a similar chord at RealClearLife, saying, “Most semi-woke individuals sometime during the 141-minute movie will notice the absence of people of color in speaking roles. Not there on the mammoth screen. Not there historically. Not in space. (And possibly absent from the audience.)”

To remind us that not all of America was cheering along with NASA, First Man director Damien Chazelle includes a snippet of an interview with the left-wing novelist Kurt Vonnegut in which the writer suggests the funding for the moonshot would have been better spent on making New York City “inhabitable” and also a satirical song sung by Leon Bridges, written by Gil Scott-Heron, called “Whitey on the Moon.” Brody says (and I agree) that Chazelle is mocking the haters and doubters as small-minded. Adams seems to find the rendition of “Whitey on the Moon” to be the highlight of First Man and devotes most of her essay to it: “As then, so now, Scott-Heron articulates the disconnect between the space race and the underclass. We can send a man to the moon but we can’t care for our people on the street and in the ghetto.”


If only we had spent some money on anti-poverty programs . . .