Get ‘The Right Stuff’ to celebrate 40th anniversary of moon landing

In theaters Friday: (500) Days of Summer, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

New on DVD/Blu-ray: The Edge of Love, The Haunting in Connecticut

No, not the moonwalk everyone’s been talking about since Michael Jackson died two weeks ago. Next Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the real one, the first and more astounding moonwalk by NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on July 21, 1969.

Though Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 is probably the best picture in his often-mediocre canon, and actually features characters playing Armstrong and Aldrin, I’d recommend Phillip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff to get you primed and ready to relaunch that youthful fascination you once had with space travel all over again this weekend.

From the get-go this true story of NASA’s pre-Apollo program called Mercury and the seven all-star flyboys who became the very first astronauts and national celebrities is a movie that speaks the ragged poetry of thrill jockeys. Based on the book by Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff stars Sam Shepard as Air Force ace Chuck Yeager, a strong silent type, but put him in a cockpit, he’s the fastest man on the planet. Scott Glenn plays Naval aviator Alan Sheperd with a laconic swagger. And the great Ed Harris stars as John Glenn, the Marine, the “boy scout,” the future senator who becomes the bedrock of this wild group of egos in their race to beat the Russians into space and navigate their new lives as American heroes.

It’s John Glenn who rallies the others into a real team to stand up against the German engineers and the suits who keep calling their spacecraft a pod, and who treat these daredevils like cargo, not pilots. Under Glenn’s leadership, these Mercury astronauts forged the template for what every young boy — and lots of girls, too — for the next several decades wanted to be when they grew up.

Along with Dennis Quaid, Barbara Hershey and Levon Helm, the actors are superbly cast, and there’s some comedy, too, with a doofus depiction of Vice President Lyndon Johnson and extended cameos by Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer as a duo of NASA flacks charged with keeping upper management appraised of Russia’s activities. Their banter is almost Spinal Tap-worthy, and definitely adds a taste of Dr. Strangelove to these proceedings, lest we stare too wide-eyed at the fearless cowboys in the cockpits and forget that NASA is a government agency after all.

Released in 1983, the film mixes actual NASA footage of test launches and splashdowns with brilliantly staged aerial cinematography of jets and rockets tearing through the sky. The Right Stuff is inspirational without being melodramatic, and it’s a tutorial on how to make a seamless movie with multiple lead characters. Plus, the Tchaikovsky-inspired music was composed by LSU alum Bill Conti of Rocky theme fame, and it is incredible.

If you want to be inspired on the eve of this landmark anniversary, look no further than The Right Stuff. It’s like watching history in the making, but history that’s legitimately mind-blowing. Like Sheperd’s Yeager says in the film, “It takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that’s on TV.”