Hidden Figures (PG)

four stars

Dir: Theodore Melfi

With: Taraji P Henson, Octavia Spencer, Kevin Costner

Runtime: 127 minutes

WHILE last year’s Academy Awards gave rise to the #OscarsSoWhite protest, this year’s ceremony can lay claim to being a more diverse affair, with pictures and performances from black artists featuring more prominently among the nominations. About time, too. Hey, it only took the Academy’s voters a century to catch up.

Among the contenders is this solid gold drama from Theodore Melfi about the US space programme and the hitherto untold (in film, anyway) story of African-American women’s role in powering it towards success. If that sounds a tad worthy, and the PG certificate has you thinking this is going to be a soft-soap affair, fear not. With subtlety, wit and grace, Hidden Figures gets its points across more forcefully than many a more polemical piece might have done.

With a screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, adapted from the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures starts in 1926 with a girl, Katherine, who is gifted beyond her years at maths. If she were another sex, or another colour, by the next time we catch up with her she should be flying high in her career.

But when we next meet Katherine it is 1961 and she is one of three African-American women driving towards Nasa HQ in Virginia when their car breaks down. From the way the three have to mind their Ps and Qs towards a white police officer who has stopped to find out what is going on, we know without doubt that these women are treated like second class citizens in their own country.

When they do get to the office it is segregated, with African-American female mathematicians only allowed to work as “computers” (these were the days before the actual shiny plastic boxes came along), while white men do the seemingly more important stuff, and other women type.

The “important stuff” in this case was beating the Russians in the space race. All three women have a part to play – Katherine (Taraji P Henson) as a mathematician, Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) as a manager, and Mary (Janelle Monae) as an aspiring engineer, but not one of them can get a break. Even when Katherine is moved to the main unit she finds barriers standing in her way, whether it be bigoted colleagues or a segregated bathroom that is a 20-minute sprint away.

Heading the research programme is Al Harrison, played by Kevin Costner in full, JFK, vintage specs and speechifying mode. Unlike some of his colleagues (two of them played by the Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons and Kirsten Dunst), Harrison is keen to support Katherine because he knows she is the best person for the job. But even with his backing, can Katherine and her friends possibly get on in such times?

Schroeder and Melfi’s screenplay – up for an Oscar alongside the film for best picture and Octavia Spencer for best supporting actress – deftly balances issues of sex as well as race. Delicately, but with a great deal of power, Hidden Figures exposes the divisions of the times, divisions that continue to this day.

At the same time, Melfi’s picture offers a look at the space race, a story that never fails to thrill. It’s all here – tense scenes at mission control, last minute hitches. There are soapy interludes as we drop in on the women’s lives outside the office. The whole enterprise sings of the Sixties, from the costumes to the cars, and if all that is not enough, the picture is a hymn to education as a way of empowering women. As Katherine says of her computer colleagues: “They let women do things at Nasa, and it is not because we wear skirts but because we wear glasses.”

Melfi’s picture teeters on the verge of cheesiness at times, and there are some moments when you can feel the emotions being tugged rather too vigorously. But I defy anyone not to cheer these heroines on. Be sure to stay till the end of the credits for another treat. Hidden Figures – it’s one to shout about.