Now playing: 'First Man,' an intense look at Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11's trek to the moon

NASA’s chief historian wasn’t going to sugarcoat it, even for a superstar like Ryan Gosling: Portraying humanity’s first ambassador to walk on the moon was a near-impossible task.

Gosling’s challenge of becoming Neil Armstrong, Bill Barry told him at Johnson Space Center in Houston, was likely the most difficult aspect of filming “First Man,” a biographical drama making its theatrical premiere today. How would Gosling absorb Armstrong’s complicated, internally focused personality and broadcast it to audiences?

The impending presence of an Apollo-era Saturn V rocket next to them — one of three left in the world — waited for Gosling’s answer.

“Yeah, I’m working on that,” he said with a quiet intensity, leaving an impression on Barry he recounted in September.

“It struck me,” Barry recalled. “That’s exactly what Neil Armstrong would have said.”

Gosling weaves that understanding of Armstrong and his family into the film with actress Claire Foy, who portrays wife Janet, from a nearly fatal 1961 hypersonic aircraft incident to Apollo 11’s success eight years later. Filling the gap for two hours and 18 minutes: Tragedy, spaceflight training, the trials of being an astronaut wife, raising children, maverick piloting and even a love of music.

“He was an extremely layered person, and I think that was the challenge,” Gosling told FLORIDA TODAY. “He was famously sort of remote and, some people felt, unknowable.”

Armstrong, Gosling said, is typically described as being emotionally distant, though that doesn’t mean “he didn’t have them or feel very deeply about things.” Showing Armstrong’s emotional depths became a priority for Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle and writer Josh Singer through scenarios gleaned from other astronaut families, friends and research.

“We tried many different approaches to create windows into his psyche and experiences to help the audience try to know him in the way we were coming to know him,” Gosling said.

His orientations prior to filming included on-site training at JSC and Kennedy Space Center, meetings with Armstrong’s sons and astronauts, and a familiarization with the movie’s foundation, a 2005 book of the same title by James R. Hansen. It draws from more than 50 hours of interviews with Armstrong before his passing in 2012 and even more with family and friends.

While the eyes of the world were focused on the Apollo program, the storyline at home was “fabulously” portrayed by Gosling and Foy, Armstrong's sons, Mark and Rick, said in September.

“He’s been called reclusive and things of that nature,” Mark Armstrong said of his father’s post-Apollo days, during which he toured the world and taught at the University of Cincinnati.

“That’s not him at all. He had a great sense of humor. He was fun-loving. He loved music.”

[Things we learned about 'First Man' and Neil Armstrong]

[Ryan Gosling at Kennedy Space Center for 'First Man' — again]

The small, family-oriented details — like the astronaut’s propensity to belt out lyrics from musicals at home —  found places throughout “First Man,” at least partly due to Armstrong's sons, who joined Universal Pictures’ production process from the beginning.

“Dad’s not an easy guy to play. He was a quiet guy and doesn’t say much, but when he says something, it’s usually very well-thought-out,” Mark Armstrong said.

Foy, meanwhile, was “off-the-charts amazing” at portraying the tensions between their parents and standing in for a wife — just one of many —  who “had all the worry and none of the control.”

“I think mom is a proxy for all wives at that time,” Mark Armstrong said. “We see our mother in Claire’s performance and, having lost her recently, it’s very emotional for us.”

The actress best known for her role as Queen Elizabeth in Netflix's “The Crown” said she’s driven to portray real people. The research and understanding that comes with that, however, is a responsibility.

“You owe it to yourself and everybody else to do the research,” Foy said at KSC in September. “Especially with this story, because the more you find out, the more you want to know. You never want to stop learning about them.”

With an unshaken “confidence in the mission,” Neil Armstrong leaves his family behind for the climactic end of the film, and the timeline shifts into high gear: Launch from pad 39A, docking with the Apollo Lunar Lander, insertion orbit and little-known factors that almost culminated in mission failure.

In the quiet of vacuum, “First Man” follows his first steps onto the soft, powdery surface of a foreign world and confronts a mystery that has confounded experts for 50 years: Why did Armstrong make an unplanned 200-foot trek to Little West Crater? Moviegoers will have to see the film’s answer for themselves.

Hansen, who came to personally know Armstrong over years of discussions, said it was a poetic way to bring his story full circle and confront a tragedy that molded him for decades to come.

“There are times when the power of poetry prevails over the uncertainty of fact,” he said.

Contact Emre Kelly at aekelly@floridatoday.com or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @EmreKelly.