Lucy in the Sky review: Astronaut drama leaves Natalie Portman stranded in the stars

Director Noah Hawley fails to find solid ground in the true story of Nasa’s Lisa Nowak, whose cross-country dash made headlines in 2007

Clarisse Loughrey
Thursday 05 December 2019 10:45 GMT
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Lucy in the Sky trailer

Dir: Noah Hawley. Cast: Natalie Portman, Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, Dan Stevens, Pearl Amanda Dickson, Ellen Burstyn. 15 cert, 125 mins.

There’s a question that audiences will inevitably ask themselves at the end of Lucy in the Sky: where were the diapers? It’s a lurid piece of gossip that came to dominate the true story of Nasa’s Capt Lisa Nowak. In 2007, she was arrested in Orlando, Florida, and charged with the attempted kidnapping of US Air Force Capt Colleen Shipman, whose boyfriend William Oefelein – also an astronaut – Nowak was having an affair with. She was found dressed in a wig and trench coat, armed with a BB gun, hammer, pepper spray, rubber tubing, and an eight-inch knife. But the police report further claimed that Nowak wore a pair of adult diapers on her overnight drive from Houston to Orlando, so she could avoid having to stop along the way. Her lawyer later denied this had happened, but it was too late. The diapers had become the headline.

Noah Hawley’s film doesn’t claim to tell the truth of the situation. His story is about a fictional Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman), who makes the same cross-country dash, but here it’s explained as being a direct result of her going crazy in outer space. The film opens on Lucy, suspended against inky black, as she looks down at her home planet – a spider’s web of city lights. Somewhere down there is her ordinary life, with her very ordinary husband (Dan Stevens, sporting a sitcom dad moustache). “Just a few more minutes,” she begs, after being told that it’s time to head back.

What can Lucy do with herself now, having faced the depth of her own insignificance? Well, according to Hawley, who wrote the script alongside Brian C Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi, the only way to deal with an existential crisis is to flirt with Jon Hamm (or, to be precise, Jon Hamm playing Lucy’s Nasa colleague Mark Goodwin)

Lucy in the Sky attempts to crank cosmic meaning out of a momentary media obsession. There’s something admirable in the idea of restoring dignity to a woman who, in reality, was diagnosed with several mental and developmental disorders during her trial. But Hawley’s viewpoint feels almost as reductive. Even before Erin (Zazie Beetz) becomes a rival for Mark’s affections, Lucy pins the younger woman as a potential threat to her future at Nasa. Hawley attempts to blame her paranoia on the company’s ingrained sexism, but it’s an under-explored motivation that seems to have mainly been trotted out to shield Lucy from criticism.

Many of Portman’s recent choices (including Vox Lux and Jackie) have seen her drawn towards complex and conflicted women. And Lucy – with an accent borrowed from Holly Hunter and a wig borrowed from the Stranger Things kids – would at first seem like an interesting challenge. But Hawley (best known for his television work on Fargo and Legion) often drowns his star in unnecessary visual trickery, including an ever-shifting aspect ratio to reflect the confines of earthly existence versus the limitlessness of space. The inspiration for the film’s title, the 1967 Beatles song, appears only as a breathy, twee cover. By failing to find the solid ground in Nowak’s story, Lucy in the Sky leaves us stranded in the stars.

‘Lucy in the Sky’ is released in UK cinemas on 6 December

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