'Nyad' review: Annette Bening shines in distance swimmer's inspiring story

WHAT IT’S ABOUT Long-distance swimming isn’t a sport that routinely produces household names, but one of the biggest fish in that pond was Diana Nyad. During the 1970s, she famously swam the kinds of lengths that sound more like yachting trips: 22 miles through the Gulf of Naples, 28 miles around the island of Manhattan. In 1978 she attempted 110 miles from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida — a legendarily difficult journey fraught with powerful currents and sharks. She got through 42 punishing hours before doctors called her out of the water.

After her swimming career ended, Nyad became a sports commentator — and this is where we meet her, played by Annette Bening, in “Nyad.” She’s a woman in late-life crisis: isolated, bitter, almost comical in her level of cosmic disappointment. “Just because we’re on a one-way street hurtling toward death doesn’t mean we have to succumb to mediocrity,” she fumes, scaring away a possible date. We won’t learn until later that Nyad was sexually abused as a child by her favorite coach, a memory that poked holes in her confidence even at her peak.

Finally, at the age of 60, Nyad turns to her lifelong friend, racquetball coach Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster), to announce that she will undertake Cuba-to-Florida once more. And this time, she says, no shark cage: “I don’t want an asterisk next to my life’s greatest achievement.”

MY SAY “Nyad” is the first narrative feature from Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the married directors behind the Oscar-winning rock-climbing documentary “Free Solo.” Where that film felt like an ode to masculinity — its subject, Alex Honnold, put the climb ahead of everything, including the woman he loves — “Nyad” is about the bond between two women. Based on Nyad’s memoir (Julia Cox wrote the rock-solid screenplay), this is the story of both one athlete’s quest for greatness and the friendship that made it possible.

It helps that “Nyad,” which had a brief theatrical run, boasts two of the best actors around, both of whom wear their roles as comfortably as old pajamas. Nyad and Stoll are gay but not lovers, yet they argue and laugh and see right through each other the way old married couples do. They are a born athlete and coach: One has an all-devouring ego, the other knows exactly how to fuel it. As Nyad swims against currents, slips into hallucinations (she imagines swimming through the Taj Mahal) and suffers near-fatal jellyfish stings, Stoll is always right there on the boat. (Rhys Ifans, as captain John Bartlett, is terrific as a grouchy seadog who knows better than to get between them.)

About that asterisk: There is one. Following Nyad’s swim, questions were raised about her surprising speed, her nontraditional protective bodysuit and other issues. Muddying the water, so to speak, was that Nyad had already told a couple of fibs, like the one about competing in the 1968 Olympic trials (she didn't). The World Open Water Swimming Association has never ratified her 2013 Cuba-to-Florida swim, even after a re-investigation this past September in the run-up to this film's release.

Rules are rules, of course, but most viewers probably won’t care whether Nyad wore the right suit. What counts, as Nyad says with fierce conviction, is “the mind” — possibly the only part of the body that can improve dramatically with age. Officially or unofficially, Nyad achieved something tremendous, something meaningful, and this film puts it on the record.

BOTTOM LINE An inspirational story about what it takes to achieve a late-life dream.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com