CERT: PG / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: SHELAGH MCLEOD / STARRING: RICHARD DREYFUSS, LYRIQ BENT, KRISTA BRIDGES, RICHIE LAWRENCE, COLM FEORE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Denied a theatrical release in the wake of the global shutdown, Shelagh Mcleod’s Astronaut will surely benefit from being viewed in the safety and security of your own home. In the cinema, it would almost certainly have been met with a shoulder shrug as it’s very much a small, intimate story that would have been a little lost and out of place on the big screen amongst the capes, cowls, and crashes and bangs of the spring blockbuster season. In its way, it’s as fanciful and far-fetched as any superhero or sci-fi flick, though. Still, despite its plot contrivances and implausibilities it tells a sweet, wistful – some might say slightly mawkish – tale of unfulfilled dreams, burning ambition, and one man raging against the dying of the light.

Richard Dreyfuss plays Angus Stewart, a retired seventy-something civil engineer who finds himself living with his daughter Molly (Bridges), his son-in-law Jim (Bent), and his adoring grandson Barney (Lawrence). Unceremoniously dumped into a care home that he seems entirely unsuited for, Angus sees a televised appeal from an Elon Musk-like philanthropist planning the world’s first commercial space flight offering seats for a dozen lucky entrants into a special lottery. Frustrated by his new circumstances and feeling that life may yet have a final adventure to offer, Angus decides to enter the lottery. This is about the point that will require a suspension of disbelief that might be a step too far for many viewers as Angus is selected from the draw and has to undergo an interview process to ascertain his suitability for the rigours of light space flight. This, remember, is a man in poor health in his seventies. Needless to say, things don’t quite go to plan, but Angus realises that the flight is doomed to failure due to an avoidable technical fault. Can he persuade the flight’s bigwigs that he knows what he’s talking about and isn’t just a slightly-doddery old man with crushed dreams?

Astronaut is a light and inconsequential little film, and yet its heart is very clearly in the right place. Setting aside the fact that a man in his seventies is never going to be selected from a lottery for a spaceflight (Angus lies about his age as the upper limit for entrants is 65, and yet he manages to fool the authorities with a fake ID provided by his grandson), there is much to enjoy in this slight and undeniably sentimental story which, refreshingly, is about people and not spectacle (you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that the budget is clearly stretched by a couple of more ambitious scenes towards the end of the film) and Dreyfuss’ sensitive, believable, and often quite touching portrayal of a man staring obsolescence in the face papers over the cracks in a space story that would otherwise be unlikely to get off the ground never mind into orbit.