From the first images to the last -- the opening series of beautiful blackout shots of a dark, dismal, backward coal-mining community as it absorbs the news of the ascent of Sputnik in the fall of 1957, and the closing clips from charming old home movies of the real people on whom the characters were based -- this serves up a flavorful if sugary slice of small-town Americana. A novelty among youth movies in its valuation of brains over brawn and work over play, it tells the true story of the widening horizons of a bright but unmotivated West Virginia high-schooler called Homer Hickam, Jr., who takes to heart the prognostication of his pretty blond teacher ("Things'll never be the same again"), can hardly fathom the idea that a university might tender a scholarship to a science-fair champion and not just to a football star like his big brother, and gets down to work, with the assistance of an ostracized science geek, on a rocket of his own. Jake Gyllenhaal makes a highly likable hero, exactly the kind of teenager who could inspire actual parents of teenagers to fantasize about a straight-up swap. And Chris Cooper, one of the most touching faces on the American screen, one of the most beat-up and careworn, has here a rare role that fully utilizes it: the boy's dutiful father and a real man's man (no irony intended), who has breathed coal dust his entire life, regards Wernher von Braun as an unsuitable role model for a youngster, and views this rocket business as a pretty silly diversion before the boy accepts his fate as a coal miner. The early disasters on the launching pad are genuinely funny, the larger setbacks (trouble with the law, sabotage at the science fair) are never too worrisome, and the plentiful pop songs of the period ("Let 'em have outer space," shrugs an average American adolescent. "We've got rock-and-roll!") continually transform the long hard grind into a breezy montage. It might all have amounted to too much niceness if the niceness didn't include a nice sense of pace and emphasis, a nice sense of where the nailheads are and of how large a hammer is called for. A pile driver would never have been the right implement. With Chris Owen, Laura Dern; directed by Joe Johnston. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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