“Nyad” is a triumph of the human spirit film, a crowd-pleasing sports drama about achieving the near impossible. It is no surprise that marathon swimmer Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) will realize her dream — to swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys in her 60s. It is how this story is told that matters.
Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are no strangers to real-life heroics as their documentaries, the Oscar-winning “Free Solo,” and “The Rescue,” have shown. Here, making their feature narrative film debut, Vasarhelyi and Chin use their skills as filmmakers to recreate Diana Nyad’s four subsequent attempts to swim the dangerous 103 miles having first tried to accomplish this feat back in 1978.
