​The TV show For All Mankind posits that if the Soviets had gotten to the moon first, the shame of it would’ve kept the US competing in the Space Race long after the end of the Apollo program.  Moon bases would’ve been established, rocketry would’ve continued to advance, NASA would’ve widened its reach to women and minorities, and we’d get to Mars.  The technological leaps would’ve kept coming because the pure discovery of the thing isn’t enough to keep the money spigot open.  National security interests, more than anything else, are what makes the dollars flow.  The Right Stuff meticulously documents the way that the first stages of the Cold War are driven by the military and the raw masculine desire to come out on top, watching admiringly at the results produced by the sheer resources of the government and the derring-do of the cast.  Phillip Kaufman’s three-hour-plus epic gets back to an exciting time in American life, one that feels like it was metaphorically elevating the citizenry as it was shooting the ‘best’ of us into the outer atmosphere.  The Right Stuff also pokes fun at a period of repeated failures and humiliations that is aggressively sold to the public as a mythic adventure.  Though it seems unlikely that anyone would call it the most imaginative or cinematic of any American film about space travel or the space program, Kaufman does produce a thorough depiction of the men of the Mercury program, their predecessors at Edwards Air Force Base, and what distinguished the two groups.

​Richard Linklater is the foremost filmmaker when it comes to American male childhood.  He nailed high school in Dazed and Confused, college in Everybody Wants Some, and boyhood in… Boyhood.  Linklater takes another crack at being young and Texan in Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood.  If that seems like a retread after Boyhood, it does to Linklater, too, because he mixes fantasy and reality here in way that he couldn’t in Boyhood.  Apollo 10 ½’s nostalgic journey into unsupervised exurban bliss gets its greatest oomph from the tiny details of Galveston beach instead of its moon-walking adventure, likely because Linklater’s been stung by a jellyfish but never left footprints on the lunar surface.