Now playing at the Old Greenbelt Theatre. Review by Anna Socrates.

Although I made straight A’s and grasped concepts quickly, my seventh-grade math teacher did not recommend me for an accelerated program to take algebra a year early. Her unsubtle message was that girls didn’t need higher mathematics. This pernicious message persists today, despite the efforts of parents and educators to encourage girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. In recent years, retailers have recalled T-shirts proclaiming that “math is hard” and the wearer is “too pretty to do homework,” and labor statistics show a continuing gender gap. Women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce, but represent only 11 percent of all aerospace engineers, receive only 21 percent of all computer science PhDs, and earn only $0.83 for every dollar that men in STEM fields are paid.

All the more welcome is Theodore Melfi’s film Hidden Figures, the story of three brilliant African American women working at NASA in the early 1960s who had to overcome not only gender discrimination, but also the race barrier. Katherine Gobel Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) carpools through rural Virginia to her job as a “computer” at NASA’s Langley Research Center with her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe). Before the widespread availability of mechanical computers, women performed the complex, and often tedious, calculations necessary for the early space program.

Although the work required skill and education, the African American computers were paid a fraction of what their white, male colleagues at NASA earned, and they were segregated in the “Colored Computing Room” away from the main project areas, unless they were on a temporary assignment. Because this is the early 1960s and the segregated South, NASA had to implement separate—and unequal—work spaces, cafeterias, and bathrooms for their African American staff. On Katherine’s first day in the Space Calculation Group, an engineer hands her a trash can to empty, and on the second day, she is given a separate pot, so she won’t sully the communal coffee urn.

The times are a-changing, however, as the space race, the Cold War, and Civil Rights create new opportunities for the three women. Mary sues the county so she can take night courses at the white high school to qualify for NASA’s engineering training program. Dorothy, stymied in her efforts to advance, encourages her colleagues to learn FORTRAN so they won’t be replaced by the new IBM mainframes; she is eventually promoted to supervisor for the IBM programmers. Katherine, whose command of analytic geometry earns the respect of her gruff boss Mr. Harrison (Kevin Costner), is allowed in the Pentagon briefing room and Mission Control, where she double checks the flight and reentry trajectories for John Glenn’s first orbit around the Earth.

Hidden Figures earns 5 reels for an inspiring story with humorous moments, a positive message about the value of education and persistence, an outstanding ensemble cast, and a refreshing Pharrell Williams score. But could this really be a workplace in the 1960s if no one smoked?

Check the theater website for information about movie times and online tickets. Hidden Figures accessibility: OC, 11:45 Sunday; all other showings with CC and descriptive audio.