Review: Hidden Figures (PG)

Based on the little-known story of the black American women who helped win the space race, Hidden Figures turns Margot Lee Shetterly’s non-fiction book of the same name into a joyously entertaining film about overcoming professional and societal odds in a country that frequently forgets the true value of democracy and meritocracy.

The film zeroes in on a trio of maths whizzes whose brains have got them through NASA’s doors, only to find other doors marked “coloured” in the halls of its Virginia HQ. In the segregated south of 1961, it doesn’t matter if they have a gift for computing the advanced data required to beat the Russians into space, they’re still not respected enough to share bathrooms or coffee machines with their white colleagues. So Katherine Johnson (Taraji P Henson), a former child prodigy whose abilities are recognised enough to elevate her to the Space Task Group, finds that her skin colour and gender preclude her from full security clearance to do the job properly. Her friends Dorothy Vaughn (an Oscar-nominated Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) have their own issues: the former is vying for the promotion and salary she deserves for managing NASA’s computing team; the latter is fighting for the right to boost her own considerable qualifications so she can become NASA’s first female engineer. Hidden Figures tells their story in a fairly conventional Hollywood way, but while it may show its working with lots of on-the-nose dialogue, encoded within the formula are plenty of layers of sophistication. This is a movie focusing on the multiple, almost imperceptible ways its heroines have to negotiate the strictures of daily life just to be able to do their jobs.