I’ve met two kinds of people who are really into space in my life.
The first type are the diehards — they’ve at least dabbled in astrophysics, made pilgrimages to Cape Canaveral and their Facebook timeline makes it clear that they freakin’ love science.
The second kind are specifically interested in American space exploration. That it was President John Kennedy who issued the famous moonshot challenge adds an element of Camelot to everything the story touches. The heyday of NASA in the Sixties and early Seventies, for them, is a feel-good counterpoint to the chaos of hippies, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. They thrive in seeing America’s best and brightest young men — virtually all of them with some background in the U.S. military — standing tall and actively taking on the Rooskies for extra-terrestrial superiority as the Cold War developed.
Either of those obsessions will be satisfied by director Mark Craig’s “The Last Man on the Moon,” a finely crafted documentary of the life of Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, the 12th and last man to walk on the moon.
The recounting of Cernan’s life in the film balances the nuts-and-bolts stories — launching into orbit, spacewalking, zooming back to earth — with the anecdotal talk of him being the American hero that you’d surmise from the parades he rode in and the yearslong world tour he embarked on after coming back from the lunar surface.
“I’m the luckiest human being in the world. I don’t going around living in the past for the most part, but every once in a while you let yourself go back in time,” Cernan notes early in the film. “I look up there and I might just reflect for half a minute or so. I can take myself there just being in thought.”
Craig quickly establishes Cernan as just a regular guy who did incredible things, picturing him taking in a rodeo — perhaps the most down-to-earth enterprise possible — in Houston, a town otherwise known for watching over folks like Cernan once they’ve rocketed off into the heavens. The symbolism of him wincing as bull riders hang on for their dear lives before hurtling to the ground is about as bluntly forceful as the jolt of takeoff.
“The Last Man on the Moon” covers all the important bases: Astronauts marveling at the “pure silence” of the lunar surface, the wives and ex-wives of those same astronauts recounting how they all lived on the same block in the Houston ‘burbs, having get-togethers, pool parties and games of Twister whenever the men weren’t competing against one another for prime position for a shuttle mission.
For all the film’s impressive archival video from earth and beyond — not to mention a Saul Bass-inspired animation recounting Cernan’s secretive application process to become an astronaut — it still falls on some staples of documentary filmmaking, right down to the Ken Burns-patented pan-and-zooming on photos of family members glued to TV newscasts of how everyone was faring up on the moon. It also suffers slightly due to an over-reliance on dramatic readings of letters, dramatic recountings of scary moments, moments of grief as fellow astronauts died in pursuit of their mission. They threaten to derail an otherwise well-paced documentary, with some moments feeling more like a well-curated video essay that one might see at a book reading.
To Craig and his crew’s credit, they do pay some lip service to the societal upheaval that was going on at the time, too, but only to point out that these men were so busy working and ignoring their families to understand what was happening across the country. It’s certainly a major undercurrent through the film, which delves into Cernan’s divorce from his first wife and the difficulty his family had with the newfound fame (“You had to learn how to deal with it,” Cernan says, “I mean, you walked around with a halo over your head.”) That Cernan, now a grandfather, is shown to still be keeping busy, jetting around to give speeches and attend conventions, shows that his whirlwind of a life never really slowed down.
This man and many others like him felt invincible and bullet-proof as young men in their 20s, mastering fighter jets, only to be humbled by failures of being on the bleeding edge of innovation at NASA, and then bolstered again as larger-than-life figures of global admiration. Cernan, after all these years, seems to have found the answer for himself when it comes to balancing his indulgence of the past and the embrace of his present.
“I don’t think I’m selfish. I think I do think of somebody else. I think of those people who want a piece of you. Who you somehow owe a piece to,” Cernan candidly asserts. “But there is a limit. Now I think I owe a piece of me to my family.”
This film might just allow him to appease everyone who wants a piece of him, for whatever reason.
“The Last Man on the Moon” is unrated but suitable for general audiences. Running time: One hour, 39 minutes. Three stars out of five. Opens Feb. 26 at the Sie FilmCenter, with former Navy fighter pilot Fred ‘Baldy’ Baldwin in person at the 7:30 p.m. screening for a Q&A.