The feature debut of writer / director Noah Hawley, after several very successful years as writer / producer of the TV series The Unusuals, Fargo and Legion, Lucy In The Sky is based on a true and slightly mind-boggling story, that of astronaut Lisa Nowak, a NASA robotic expert who travelled to the International Space Station in July 2006, and on her return became involved with fellow astronaut William Oefelein, who was already involved with another woman, Kowak and Oefelein’s relationship eventually escalating into tabloid-worthy headlines involving a love triangle, a cross-country drive, a kidnapping attempt and the use of adult nappies to avoid rest stops along the way. The story immediately became media fodder, and an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, entitled Rocket Man and very loosely based on the story, hit US TV screens on 1st May 2007, just eighty-four days after the actual events of 5th February of that year.

This film version, coming some thirteen years later, had a slightly rocky path to the screen, originally announced under the title Pale Blue Dot, the title given to the famous photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 from a distance of some 6 billion km, was to be produced by Reese Witherspoon and Bruna Papandrea, with Witherspoon taking the lead, Hawley being brought into as a third producer, but then losing its’ lead when the actress left to make another series of the the TV hit Big Little Lies, Hawley being named as director when Natalie Portman (the second Star Wars trilogy / Black Swan) joined the cast.

The script by Noah Hawley, Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi, and an uncredited John-Henry Butterworth, takes a far less salacious approach to the story than the TV version, but also diversifies to the point of adding completely invented characters, such as the bizarrely-named Blue Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson, returning from Legion), who seems to be there purely to be a witness to her aunt’s increasingly eccentric behaviour in the final stages, and omitting some of the elements which people would most immediately recognise, such as the adult nappies, the producers saying ‘We don’t need to punish her’, referring to Kowak. Instead Hawley adds several scenes of Lucy spacewalking, and becoming testy when she has to return to the ISS modules, which is backed up by the fact that Lisa Kowak undertook multiple spacewalks over the course of the mission, and adds shots of butterflies while she is on Earth to emphasise the metaphor, but while Portman has other acting qualities, empathy isn’t one of them, and many critics said they found it impossible to sympathise with his cold and singleminded woman, all too keen to get rid of the one true anchor in her life, her husband Drew (British actor Dan Stevens, another Legion returnee) for an affair with a womanising fellow astronaut, Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm - Tag / TV’s Mad Men), who is also involved with another woman, trainee Erin (Zazie Beetz - Deadpool 2 / TV’s Atlanta), Lucy being unable to cope with the mundanity of her life once back on Earth. But what may irritate some all the more is that Hawley repeatedly shifts the aspect ratio of the frame, from an approx 2.40 widescreen to a more boxy 1.37 ratio when everything seems to be crowning in on Lucy and her world, and having it happens several times, which becomes extremely distracting.

The pic debuted at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival to very a lukewarm reception, but even that perhaps didn’t prepare anybody for the absolutely box-office apathy, the pic taking exactly $319,976 (@£257,366) in its entire US run, never playing on more than 37 screens, and an entire $5,974 (@£4,805), you read that right, from it’s only overseas run, one week in the UK, but despite this the film secured a couple of very positive reviews, The Guardian calling it ‘ … a witty, intriguing film in many ways ... But I also feel the film is unsure of how much to disturb its audience, unsure whether to pursue the chaos and embarrassment of a bungled, noir-ish crime and an unsightly psychological disorder, or to contrive something more emollient: to finesse some sympathy and even heroism for the story’s troubled female lead’, and IGN noting ‘Natalie Portman excels in Lucy in the Sky, an interesting character study that suffers when mixing fact and fiction’. But others found it less than stellar, The Hollywood Reporter calling it ‘ … the odd film that starts cosmically big and gradually becomes narrower and more conventional as it goes along, to diminishing returns’, with Variety calling it ‘Distractingly over-directed ... [Hawley] triple-knots his own shoelaces here, stumbling over cumbersome metaphors (butterflies, floating) and high-concept solutions to straightforward dramatic problems when he should have just entrusted his leading lady to carry the narrative’. The Playlist simply summed it up as ‘A wildly misbegotten mess, a goulash of incongruent tones and unclear motives’.