The 1950s - 70s heyday of the United States’ manned space program has been a relatively successful (if strangely infrequent) source of compelling cinematic stories, inspiring both rousing dramas (The Right Stuff [1983], Apollo 13 [1995]) and engrossing documentaries (For All Mankind [1989], In the Shadow of the Moon [2007]).
The film's great problem that it turns into its great strength is that, out of the 24 humans who flew in space as part of Apollo, Armstrong was almost certainly the least interesting and absolutely the most publicity-averse (he was, for example, the only living Apollo veteran who declined to be interviewed for the 2007 documentary In the Shadow of the Moon ).