Moving tribute to behind-the-scenes heroes

Rating: 8/10 (24 February 2017)

Historically, patriotic African-Americans have often had to fight on two fronts at once, fighting for their country while countering friendly fire from countrymen who doubt either their ability or willingness to do the job. The story of black "computers" and engineers working in the U.S. space program in the early 1960s is presented here as one such example.
The Langley Research Center (near Hampton, Virginia, and not connected to the famous town where the CIA is headquartered) was an early hothouse for NASA research and development, and provided work for men and women of all races in what we now call the STEM fields. To give an idea of how affirmative action developed at NASA, by 1984, only 2 percent of U.S. engineers were black, but 8.4 percent of NASA engineers were black. This movie dramatizes how this shift developed from the beginning of NASA, when talented female and African-American mathematicians got the proverbial foot in the door. (Although, government and government contractor employment of African-Americans and women to do math related tasks went back at least to World War II, and the ups and downs of African-American civil servants can be traced back to the 1870s.)
The focus of this movie is on math prodigy Katherine Goble Johnson who becomes indispensable to the Mercury Space Program even while she has to work in a facility that still has segregated restrooms. It takes her a minimum of 40 minutes to take her breaks because the nearest "colored" restroom was half a mile away! (Sorry, as dramatic as this story is, it turns out that many of the advancements portrayed in the movie, from the biggest professional achievements of the three main characters to the desegregation of the restrooms, actually occurred by or before 1960.)
Nevertheless, this is an excellently told and acted story. As often happens, though, the filmmakers found that they had to pick one of the three characters to focus on more than the others. (Not that the other two women are ignored, they are just not done full justice.) Tariji P. Henson is a star in the best sense. Janelle Monáe and the increasingly ubiquitous Octavia Spencer round out the leading roles along with Mahershala Ali as Katherine's devoted husband. Good, if a bit stereotyped(!), in supporting roles are Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons. Glen Powell as John Glenn seems sufficiently Boy Scoutish, but he doesn't look like the thin and prematurely balding Glenn. (Ed Harris, in "The Right Stuff", remains a far more convincing Glenn.)
Couldn't quite make sense of the way Al Harrison (Costner) went about desegregating the restrooms; if he were going to be seen knocking down a sign, why the "Colored only" sign rather than the "Whites only" sign? Wasn't the latter the real problem for his star computer?