Review: In 'Nyad,' Annette Bening, with help from Jodie Foster, captures a personality as salty as the water she swims in

The accomplishment depicted in “Nyad,” a largely straightforward biographical drama of long-distance swimmer and sportscaster Diana Nyad, is remarkable. It’s the accomplishment that directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin pull off — to center a Hollywood movie around someone as brittle and hard to like as Nyad appears to be — that’s really surprising.

The movie starts with Nyad, played by Annette Bening, in 2009, approaching her 60th birthday and dreading the surprise party that she knows her best friend, Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster), is planning. After 30 years as a sportscaster and journalist, Nyad is bored and looking for a new challenge — and she hits upon it by deciding to go back to an old challenge from her days as a long-distance swimmer: Swimming the 110 miles from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida.

It’s a swim she attempted in her youth, in 1979, but couldn’t complete. Now, she’s determined to do it again. She convinces Stoll to be her coach, and starts retraining her body for the hours she will have to spend in the water, propelling herself one stroke at a time.

Nyad knows the risks of a swim in open water: Cold, storms, fatigue, hallucinations, sharks and jellyfish stings among them. She and Stoll start assembling a crew, starting with a crusty Caribbean boat pilot, John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans), who knows the variable currents better than anyone. He’s doubtful Nyad can finish the swim — and it’s only Nyad’s stubborn, self-centered persistence that keeps the team going, until her ego starts to drive everyone away, including Stoll.

Bening gives an outstanding performance that’s as uncompromising as Nyad herself. A lesser actor would have asked first-time feature screenwriter Julia Cox to whittle down the character’s sharp corners, to make her more sympathetic, maybe give her a puppy or something. Bening charges straight ahead, showing that the qualities that allowed Nyad to attempt such a long swim also made her rather hard to live with.

Matching Bening, practically stroke for stroke, is Foster, who portrays Stoll — a former racquetball player who, she says at one point, briefly dated Nyad “like, 200 years ago” — as Nyad’s friend, coach, protector and conscience, spurring her to continue her quest and calling her out on her crap when necessary. It’s a warm, lively performance that balances Bening’s cool quite well.

If there’s a weakness in “Nyad,” its that Vasarhelyi and Chin, husband-and-wife filmmakers, can’t pull themselves away enough from their documentary roots. (They share an Oscar for the 2019 climbing doc “Free Solo.”) Too much of this movie relies on archival footage, and a somewhat rigid recounting of Nyad’s failed attempts — a level of detail that may appeal to the swimming purists, but cuts into the tension of her pursuit. Still, Bening and Foster make that pursuit a worthy one to follow.

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‘Nyad’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 20, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), and will start streaming November 3 on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexual abuse, some strong language and brief partial nudity. Running time: 121 minutes.