Have you ever wanted to get a sense of the many exhaustive steps involved in not only becoming an astronaut, but also landing on the moon, back when the height of technological advancement was toggle-switches?

Watch director Damien Chazelle’s “First Man,” and you’ll feel like you lived it.

Chazelle reteams with his Academy Award-winning good-luck charm, Ryan Gosling, this time casting the soft-spoken Canadian as plain-spoken Midwestern engineer and test pilot Neil Armstrong, whom we follow in the eight years leading up to his 1969 moon landing.

Although Chazelle manages to populate his cast with a laundry list of impeccably talented character actors — including Jason Clarke and Shea Whigham as astronauts Ed White and Gus Grissom, whose lives were cut short on the launchpad of Apollo 1 — “First Man” remains very much a director’s film, as opposed to an actor’s showcase.

Part of this is Chazelle’s attempt to capture the emotional limits placed on American men by society at the time, back when “being a man” equated to stoic restraint of expression, even with one’s closest friends.

Indeed, part of the reason Corey Stoll’s performance as Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, stands out so much is because of how blunt and tactless Aldrin apparently was, which makes for an interesting contrast to the role of “America’s favorite astronaut grandpa” that pop culture seems to have cast Aldrin in since then.

The larger reason Chazelle’s direction overrides his actors’ performances, however, is because they’re on screen mostly so we in the audience can feel what their characters are experiencing, which Chazelle underscores repeatedly by alternating between closeup shots of Gosling’s eyes and no-less-tightly focused shots of the action surrounding him.

Perhaps the greatest irony of outer space exploration, as illustrated in intimate detail by the visuals of Chazelle’s cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, is how stiflingly claustrophobic the experience of being shot into space actually is.

We’re treated to every metallic creak and rattle of the spacecraft, as the camerawork conveys the absurdly small space that Armstrong and his fellow astronauts were constrained within for hours, and even days, at a time.

Like 1983’s “The Right Stuff,” based on Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book of the same name, documenting the early days of America’s space program and “space race” with the Soviet Union, “First Man” is based on the 2005 book “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong,” the well-received official biography by James R. Hansen.

Unlike “The Right Stuff,” which has become cinematic shorthand for inspiring epics of American achievement, “First Man” offers a contemplative portrait of a diligent but emotionally closed-off engineer who would just as soon not ask about the human cost of his country’s attempts to reach the stars, even when that cost could include his own life.

In its own way, though, the pioneers of the space program who appear in “First Man” are cast as no less genuinely heroic than the more swaggering portrayals offered by “The Right Stuff,” precisely because they were willing to make such sacrifices without complaint.

Aside from wishing we could have spent more time with Stoll’s Aldrin, and even though it would have created a tone-break with the rest of the film, my only real complaint was that my abdominal muscles were painfully cramped by the time the film ended because I found myself subconsciously cocooning in my theater seat every time Armstrong was strapped into his spacecraft.