“What will you do if something goes wrong while you’re up there? Will you start weeping?” The question—posed on national television, no less—lands like an unintentional punchline in Sally, a documentary that expertly toggles between reverence and indignation. The answer, of course, is that she didn’t. Not when she was the first American woman in space. Not when NASA, an institution that could calculate lunar trajectories to the millimeter, packed her hundreds of tampons for a weeklong mission. And not when she decided that a life lived partially in secret was the only safe route through a culture still recovering from the spectacle of Billie Jean King’s forced outing.

What Sally grasps, and what gives it its staying power, is how Ride’s story has always been curated—by her, for her, and eventually, about her. The film doesn’t so much correct the record as it excavates it, revealing the sediment of institutional sexism and the silences demanded by heteronormativity in equal measure. Ride’s partnership with Tam O’Shaughnessy, long hidden from public view, becomes less a scandalous reveal than a statement about the impossibility of full personhood when history demands only heroism.

Director Christina Constantini avoids hagiography not by puncturing Ride’s mystique but by contextualizing it—framing her famous composure as both a necessity and a cost. The archival footage is sometimes surreal, a carousel of 20th-century microaggressions masquerading as morning show banter. But Sally doesn’t gawk; it observes, then reflects. Ride’s legacy emerges not just in what she achieved but in what she chose to shield—and the film treats that choice not as a failing but as a strategy for survival.

There’s a version of this film that might have ended with Ride ascending into the stars. This one keeps looking back down at the atmosphere she had to break through just to get there.

Originally reviewed after its screening at SXSW 2025.