Ryan Gosling, left, in First Man (TIFF)

Remember when Kevin Costner was derided by Madonna for uttering the word “neat” in Truth or Dare? Well that’s the fitting go-to adjective said by both astronaut Neil Armstrong and his wife, Janet, in Damien Chazelle’s intimate and temperate big-screen epic about the Space Race, adapted from the book First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen. The onscreen portrayals are firmly rooted in pre-rock ’n’ roll, mid-20th century Americana. For example, Armstrong and his wife’s favorite song to dance to is 1947’s “Lunar Rhapsody” by Harry Revel, performed with the otherworldly theremin and orchestral arrangement—it sounds a lot like Johnny Mercer and David Raskin’s “Laura.”

The film’s prologue offers some of the strongest storytelling this year as Chazelle, directing from a script by Josh Singer (Spotlight), matter-of-factly lays out the exposition, beginning in 1961, as aviator/aeronautical engineer Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) pilots a military space plane 47,000 feet up in the sky, hitting turbulence. Back home on the ground, his infant daughter, Karen, has just undergone two rounds of radiation, and in the following montage, Armstrong sings to her, tucks her in, and strokes her hair. This sequence resonates throughout the rest of the depiction of the future astronaut, underscoring Armstrong’s emotional foundation: publicly he’s a man in control, outwardly strong. However, it’s a shared secret between the audience and the grief-stricken father when he breaks down after his daughter’s death.

This bond between Armstrong and viewers carries over through the film’s episodic structure, which jumps from year to year and from one groundbreaking project to the next. The centerpiece is Project Gemini, in which Armstrong and David Scott (Christopher Abbott) manned the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit. In the retelling of this and other missions, the film emphasizes the sensory experience, as opposed to a moment-by-moment literal account.

Shot on a handheld camera, the movie deploys state-of-the-art special effects, and viewers won’t know what has been pulled from the archives or re-created for the screen. These sequences blend 16mm, 35mm, and IMAX formats, all without a green screen. (Astronaut Al Worden was a technical consultant.) However, the film sags a bit in the middle—there is an abundance of cutaways to gadgets and gizmos—and the momentum begins to zip again at the start of the Apollo 11’s mission to the moon.

Arguably, the movie’s most vivid moments occur between Armstrong and his family. They are as tension-filled and tricky for him to navigate through as when he soars into the atmosphere. Award consideration for Claire Foy’s performance will be thanks to Janet’s confrontation with her husband on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch. She has a single-minded mission, to have him sit down with the boys and warn them that he may not come back.

However, Foy’s role feels confined. In an interview in New York magazine, the interviewer asked the actress, “The film deals with their daughter Karen’s death, with their own brush with death during their house fire, with their divorce. What was the most difficult scene to film?” However, there is no sequence dealing with their home ablaze or any overt hint or mention of the Armstrongs’ future 1994 divorce, after 38 years of marriage. Perhaps the article was written months before the final cut, but the question hints at the possibility of an even more complex relationship. Yet a closer examination of the marriage would have knocked the film out of its orbit and into another genre altogether.

The movie has generated some heated discussion, or distraction really, that it is somehow anti-American or downplays the country’s moment of triumph when Armstrong landed and walked on the moon. This criticism hardly describes this tribute to the astronaut and the NASA space program. While it depicts the eight-year lead up to the 1969 moon landing, it’s equally about a certain type of American male: the strong and silent type, the reluctant hero. (Come to think of it, Gosling does resembles Gary Cooper.)

In fact, the film goes out of its way to point out that the lunar mission was a feat by American scientists, with a huge assist from taxpayers—in news footage, a French woman (!) praises American ingenuity. Though there may not be a scene reenacting Armstrong’s planting of the Red, White, and Blue on the moon, the Stars and Stripes do flap in the Armstrongs’ front yard and elsewhere. More importantly, the overall understated tone is in keeping with the astronaut himself, the farmer boy who famously shied away from public accolades. Likewise, the propulsive and varied score by Justin Hurwitz never quite swells to anthem-like proportions.

Instead, the film emphasizes the efforts—and deaths along the way—that it took to achieve the moon landing. Chazelle hits triumphant notes, building to a crescendo at times but refreshingly not at fortissimo.

First Man screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and opens on October 12.