Review: You’ll cheer like crazy after seeing 'Nyad'

The thrill of watching a champion athlete make good on her biggest dare, especially in her 60s, is the reason you'll cheer like crazy after seeing "Nyad," now in theaters where four-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening is going for the win as marathon swimmer Diana Nyad.

Nyad had a lifetime goal to do the impossible by swimming without a shark cage across the daunting 110-mile distance from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida. She made her first failed attempt in 1978 at 28. She was 64 in 2013, when her dream became a reality on her fifth try.

Kudos to Bening, 65, who trained more than a year to nail the physical and mental challenges of the role. She'll make you feel every ache while evoking the determination -- straight, no sweeteners -- that drove Nyad to cross the finish line. This is body-and-soul acting at its peak.

Some call Bening unlikeable for the steel she laces into Nyad. If a man played such a thorny character, say Robert De Nitro as boxing bad boy Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull," he'd be celebrated for his tenacity. But in Hollywood, sexist hypocrisy never gets old.

No worries. Bening carries the day, along with a smashing Jodie Foster who's an exuberant blast as Bonnie Stoll, Nyad's best friend, former flirtation and eventual coach. Their teamwork is a thing of beauty as Stoll teases the hell out of Nyad's expanding ego and need to gild the lily.

In her three decades between swimming contests, Nyad made her name as a TV sports commentator with a skill for self-promotion that rubbed a few people the wrong way. Bening admirably refuses to smooth out Nyad's rough edges.

The movie itself is more of a mixed bag, dragged under by a paint-by-numbers script that Julia Cox adapted from Nyad's 2016 memoir, "Find A Way." Too bad the dialogue rings the gong so loudly with cliches about the triumph of the human spirit. Show is always better than tell.

And the news footage inserted from Nyad's real life distracts from what the actors are doing. It's frustrating that a movie about a woman who dares so much has a script that dares so little.

No complaints though about the riveting, you-are-there realism of the swimming scenes since first-time scripted directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi -- heads up, they're married -- are acclaimed documentarians with a golden Academy statue for 2018's vertigo-inducing "Free Solo," about an unassisted Yosemite climb up the sheer face of El Capitan.

The trick here is to let Bening and Foster steer you past the obvious. Besides Stoll, Nyad has a support team in a small boat following alongside as she spends nearly 53 hours swimming freestyle and dealing with stamina, sharks, jellyfish, stops for hydrating and staying afloat when navigator John Bartlett (a terrific Rhys Ifans) takes unexpected turns.

It took a village to mount Nyad's solo swim and though the movie skimps on the reported 25 on the team, we do see Luke Cosgrove as Luke Tipple, who devised an electrical field to scare off sharks, and Jenna Yi as Dr. Angel Yanagiharas, who created a bodysuit that protects Diana from the poisonous darts emitted by dreaded box jellyfish.

On dry land, "Nyad" has its problems. Flashbacks, from Diana's childhood to the sexual abuse she suffered from high school swim coach Jack Nelson (Eric T. Miller), don't feel organic or resonant. But in the water, it's full speed ahead as camera whiz Claudio Miranda ("Top Gun: Maverick") and composer Alexandre Desplat propel the action at a furious clip.

You don't need to be a softie to shed a tear and share a fist bump when Nyad takes her final bow. She's earned it. And so have Bening and Foster, two glorious actors who skip the trite in favor of the true and show how a movie crowdpleaser should be done.