Lucy In The Sky review: Natalie Portman's out-to-lunch astronaut drama is in freefall from the word go

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

There’s a true story lurking behind Lucy in the Sky, about the ex-NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak, who was arrested for kidnapping in 2007. What Tonya Harding was to figure skating, Nowak roughly was to space robotics missions – so competitive and committed she lost her mind. Notoriously, she was even said to be wearing a nappy when she was caught, intended to save time on a 14-hour cross-country drive to abduct her ex-lover’s new belle.

For film purposes, Lisa Nowak has become one Lucy Cola, and takes the form of Natalie Portman with a zany bowl cut and a dangerously broad Southern accent. The nappy is nowhere to be found. In fact, the proximity to Nowak’s story is peculiarly tenuous, to say the least – and not in that slippery, meta way that Harding’s biopic, I, Tonya, managed to finesse with cunning.

Noah Hawley, best-known for show-running the Fargo TV series and newly signed for the next Star Trek, has ticked off his film debut with a flimsy, effortful project that simply has no footing either as fact or convincing fiction. It’s in freefall from the word go. The first sequence has Portman floating in a spacesuit, far above the Earth, but shifts misguidedly to a God’s-eye view of our ant-like toil below, even though the protagonist is thousands of miles too high to appreciate any such spectacle.

Thus introduced, the instant strain of the main conceit – civilian life is puny for someone pining for the stars – only frays further when we’re landed, for the entire remainder, in boring suburbia. Lucy has a sap of a husband called Drew, played by Dan Stevens with a bushy ’tache and hail-fellow manner that’s pure Ned Flanders from The Simpsons.

No wonder, bored and alienated, she strays towards fellow astronaut Mark (a stolid Jon Hamm), who at least gives her a lifeline back to her beloved vocation, even if he’s unaware of what an out-to-lunch romantic prospect he has temporarily uncorked.

Unable to settle on one visual scheme, the film tries out a bucketload, jumping between aspect ratios with skittish abandon, and sometimes muffling the sound on scenes so we feel we’re watching dramatic moments through an aquarium.

As attempts to suggest the distortion of Lucy’s reality, these backfire because the film hasn’t got inside her head in the least. Instead, Hawley’s portrait of this unravelling woman feels like it’s being framed, reframed, and experimentally hung on different walls to test out any angle that works.

Portman has toyed with some boldly avant-garde collaborations lately – see Jackie, Annihilation and Vox Lux – and perhaps hoped this film might add to the unstable performance art she’s been exploring since Black Swan. But she needs a director who isn’t going to dither with jarring style gambles one minute, and then shove her character’s evident mental illness right in our face when the going gets tough.

There’s a certain kind of pushiness that feels unmistakably like a last resort, when everything else about your star vehicle has frazzled itself into oblivion.

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