I remember reading about a script on the black list years ago about a secretary working for Stanley Kubrick, keeping his records and papers while he conducted the moon landing shoot that would hoodwink a generation because NASA never actually went there.

I wondered if that formed the genesis of this movie after a studio picked it up and ordered a few rewrites and a romcom subplot. The IMDB.com trivia page doesn't have anything about it and after returning barely $40m from a $100m budget (although admittedly it was a streaming service movie so it probably wasn't intended to conquer the box office) it won't go down in history as a classic with books and oral histories written about it so I guess we'll never know.

But even if it's had some hard or conspiratorial edges shaved off, it's a sweet natured love story full of the tropes and cliches we know (the meet cute, the enemies-turned-lovers, comic sidekicks aplenty, etc) but despite all that it still works. Even the hint of danger lent by the shadowy government agent Moe (Woody Harrelson) is funny and cute more than scary.

It's the story of a brassy New York ad exec in a time when women weren't taken seriously, Kelly (Scarlett Johansson), and a no-nonsense NASA mission commander, Cole (Channing Tatum) and the circumstances into which they're both flung.

After the disaster of Apollo 1 in 1967, faith in the planned moon landing is at an all time low, with politicians lining up to slash NASA funding and torpedoing Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

An enigmatic government staffer (Moe) approaches Kelly and tasks her with a very special project; drum up public interest and turn the tide of the culture back towards the mission. American can't afford another loss – even a perceived one – in the space race against the Soviet Union.

Even though the straight laced Cole and his co-workers have no patience with photo shoots and interviews, nobody can deny the magic Kelly is working, with Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin on every talk show, ads for watches and soft drinks and America getting excited about the possibility of a moon mission again. It doesn't help that the pair have an undeniable attraction and are just destined to end up together.

The basic obstacle in the plot is whether NASA can mount and stage the mission by the deadline, whether Kelly can do her part selling it, whether Cole can do his part managing it technically, and what stumbling blocks or screwball misunderstandings will keep them apart until the inevitable.

That'd be enough in most versions of this story, but the script introduces more (quite major) elements that might otherwise over-egg the pudding. Just one is Kelly's true background – she's actually a con artist with fake identities and scams all over the place, which is how the guy calling himself Moe manages to recruit her (by promising to expunge her record).

But an even bigger one that augments the climax of the actual Apollo 11 launch is when he insists she oversee a film shoot faking the moon landing in case the real one doesn't work – compromising her principles, making Cole believe she has no faith in him and providing a Kubrick joke that made me wonder about a connection to the black list script.

But where it could end up a mess, overstuffed with too many story tracks and subplots, writer/director Greg Berlanti must have worked some magic to keep it all cohesive and humming because it works despite them.

It has a fantastic sense of itself, not just the design and dressing of era-appropriate fashions, cars, etc. but crisp cinematography and a clean, golden sheen we associate with the comparative innocence of the era. The production managed to capture an actual NASA launch during filming but most of the other scenes of scale and the infrastructure of the age are done with some of the best VFX you've seen so far this year.

It's all very cute and good looking and enough to melt any cynical heart for a couple of hours, taking a lot of cues from the fast talking screwball comedy era and executing them very successfully.