They were great ﬂiers, among the best, but they were human beings, too. They were the last cowboys, in all the greatest and most terrible ways. And they set the bar for the past 60 American years for speed, for thrills, for discovery, for glory, and for purpose well beyond one's own happily, if humbly, constrained life. They weren't gods, but they sure did fuck some people up with the shit they pulled off.

Engineering, technology, even aerospace would advance, but the second half of the 20th century would turn that progress inward, into computers and watches and phones, the new moon shot being a virtual marketplace that can deliver cat food and scissors overnight, and in the same box. Humanity-shifting endeavors, no doubt. But doesn't exactly shake the soul like a Saturn V rocket launch, does it?

"What is it…that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle…and wait for someone to light the fuse?" Wolfe wrote—the question that animated his book, but also our collective obsession.

This ﬁlm gets back to those sorts of places, to those impossible encounters with audacity, and our frayed wires of comprehension.

It's what Chazelle means when he says we still haven't fully processed the implications of what was achieved.

How did they do it? How did we do it? Truly?

"It feels like anytime you make a space movie, eventually you come face-to-face with 2001," Chazelle says. "And every space movie since then really is a child of 2001, whether it wants to be or not."

This is how Damien Chazelle talks about movies. With an encyclopedic baseline and a professor's facility for the family tree of all ﬁlm, the arrows of inﬂuence in multiple directions, the living conversation between ﬁlms past and present. He knows what he wants a shot to look and feel and sound like and, equally important, what it should not look and feel and sound like—all those references.

In this way, he seems older than his years. Which can probably be explained by the fact that this is a 33-year-old who, in all the most essential ways, has been making First Man (and La La Land, and Whiplash, and Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench before that) since he was a kid. A little bit, at least, every day. Every free hour of every evening growing up, he says, he would be shooting with his father's camcorder, writing scripts, studying ﬁlms he barely understood, drawing storyboards for movies that would never be made. "I was so movie-obsessed that everything revolved around that," he says. "I would try to get my schoolwork done as soon as possible so that I could just think about movies." (He spent an additional seemingly 50 hours a day becoming a jazz drummer—the whole Whiplash thing—and earning the grades to get into Harvard.)

Every day since, then, too—every day of screening ﬁve or six ﬁlms in a row for himself, or of re-reading the Hitchcock-Truffaut conversations, or of sometimes just learning when to toss out acquired knowledge and formal skill and "just shut up and look at something—just a person sitting on a subway car, or just a moment on the street, something you have no control over, and just forget all your technical knowledge and just try to capture it"—was one small step up the staircase toward becoming the kind of ﬁlmmaker who is capable of seeing anew the cosmos and the space voyagers who went there.

First Man mostly eschews the wide shots of the spacecraft, instead opting to keep the audience trapped in the capsule—confined to the disorienting glimpses out the tiny portholes.

Chazelle, it should be said, also just seems, from a few truncated interactions, like a really nice guy—not always the case with our Best Directors. When Claire Foy signed on to the project, she was amazed by the comfort on Chazelle's set: "He's so lovely that it's like he's invited you in. You don't feel like you're being tested or you've got to perform." When they ﬁrst spoke about the role via Skype, Foy wanted the job, but she presumed many other actresses did, too, and admired that he never made it feel "like I was ﬁghting for my life to get the part." Foy, like many, was curious, too, how First Man might make sense as a follow-up to La La Land: "But I just loved that idea that you can, from the outside, think that someone's making a particular type of ﬁlm, but he's just making ﬁlms that he wants to make. He's so clever…and open to the process, to the ideas that come up once you actually start making something."