‘Sally' Review: Rocket Woman

'Sally,' a welcome but unadventurous documentary about the astronaut Sally Ride (who died in 2012), wraps a risk-taking personality inside a risk-averse package.
What's lacking is style, not substance, as the movie bustles with diverting details. Lengthy interviews with Sally's life partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, are candid and sometimes piquant, but they're too often delivered inside a visual dead space. Other talking heads — including Sally's family and fellow astronauts — are handled similarly, the conventionality of Cristina Costantini's filmmaking disappointingly at odds with the singularity of her subject.
Even so, a portrait soon takes shape of an extraordinary woman whose drive and intelligence were aided by a personality that, according to one colleague, was 'strictly business.' One of the first women to be accepted into NASA in 1978 — and the first American woman to fly in space — she faced rampant sexism and an organization laughably unprepared for women in its ranks. (Would 100 tampons be sufficient for a week in space?, a male engineer wondered.) Journalists focused relentlessly on her gender, with one asking whether she would weep if she encountered a problem on a flight. As the film makes clear, Sally was not the weeping type.
That was a blessing, as she was also deeply private about her personal life. Perhaps noting the torment suffered by her friend Billie Jean King when her relationship with a woman was made public, Sally committed to secrecy. In the end, blasting through Earth's atmosphere was easier than breaching public opinion.
'It hurt me, but I'm not sure it hurt Sally,' a former girlfriend tells us, with refreshing frankness. In one brief exchange, Sally's mother, Joyce Ride, describes her as 'closed mouthed' about her feelings. When Costantini asks why that might be, an unamused Joyce replies 'It's none of your business.' Her daughter would have been proud.
SallyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Hulu and Disney+.

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