Not only is it a spelling bee movie, but it uses basically the same formula that a lot of modern sports movies use: an underdog team (or individual) overcomes adversity and ends up on top with the help of a tired old coach. These elements might be what kept a lot of moviegoers from seeing it. But I say that it’s strange because it breaks stereotypes and shows real heart and presents characters that really connect with its audience.

The movie stars Keke Palmer (who has only appeared in TV roles until now) as Akeelah, an 11-year-old seventh-grader, who lives with her widowed mother and a few siblings in a poor black neighborhood in southern Los Angeles. She hates school and constantly misses class not because she’s slow or doesn’t get it, but because she’s so advanced that it’s too boring (after all, she skipped second grade). Her English teacher sees potential when she realizes that Akeelah always aces her spelling tests, even though she gets low grades on everything else. The teacher reports this to the principal, Mr. Welch (Curtis Armstrong, Revenge of the Nerds), who pushes her to enter the school’s spelling bee. When she breezes through the competition, Mr. Welch sends her to Dr. Larabee (Lawrence Fishburne), a semi-retired English professor at UCLA to tutor her and prepare her for the national championship in Washington, D.C.

Akeelah insists that she can make it without a coach, mostly because she really doesn’t want to succeed at first. Being good at spelling means that she might be labeled as a “brainiac,” but when she barely passes the district finals on a technicality, she returns to Larabee for help. Along the way, she befriends some other spellers from a richer area of town, among them are the charming Javier, who becomes a kind of love interest; and Dylan Chu, a spelling prodigy with an overbearing father. Akeelah has a rough home-life; her father died when she was six. Her favorite brother is away in the military, and her other brother is in a gang. Her mother, Tanya (Angela Bassett), struggles to support her children, and she disapproves of Akeelah’s involvement in the competition because she doesn’t want to see her get hurt. Eventually, Akeelah becomes somewhat of an urban legend, and the entire neighborhood, including Mom, bands together to help her succeed.

It’s kind of hard to explain exactly what this movie has that makes it so special. Part of it might be that the writer of the screenplay, Doug Atchison, also directed the movie. It seems that he was able to get exactly what he wanted out of his actors because of his intimate knowledge of the screenplay. Also, there was a special chemistry among the actors that is necessary in any drama. If characters don’t connect, the audience picks up on it.

With all the old pros in this film like Fishburne, Bassett, and Armstrong, the young actress, Keke Palmer (who was actually 11 during filming), really stole the show. In any story like this that involves a young prodigy, the casting crew tends to find the most precocious and obnoxious kid they can get, mistaking precociousness as intelligence. She comes across as cute and vulnerable, but also smart and resilient, as a child growing up in a poor neighborhood would have to be.

Akeelah speaks with a black inner-city dialect, but she in capable of throwing that off and speaking like an intelligent young lady (in fact, Dr. Larabee forbids her from using “ghetto talk” when she’s at his house). Palmer does so well at showing Akeelah’s desire to fit in with her friends and environment, while hiding the genius side of her personality that she’s afraid to let show. When she finally makes it to the national finals, she has to make a choice: Is she there to win or to show that she’s the best?

Above all, Akeelah and the Bee shows that we are not victims of circumstance. Just because a person is born into a poor family, doesn’t mean they are destined to stay is those same circumstances forever. Akeelah doesn’t really have to deal with much racism or hatred from the outside, but what she really fears is the judgments of the other kids inside her social circle. It’s almost as if being exceptional is considered worse than being a failure. The thing that makes the story so compelling is how Akeelah turns that perception around. As she spells words, she taps he thigh with every letter as kind of a built-in metronome. That “music” eventually turns everyone’s perceptions around. They realize that there is a way out of hardships and that the only thing keeping them there is their own perceptions.

Akeelah and the Bee gets four Bees, without question. This is a movie that will not turn in huge numbers at the box office, but it will, hopefully, touch everyone who sees it. If parents take their children to this movie, telling them that it’s a drama and that they’ll be able to learn some important things from watching it, I think kids will have a much more positive experience with it than they will with something like R.V. Just remember that it’s rated PG and has a little bit of language that some parents don’t want their kids to hear. Even though most of us aren’t prodigies, Akeelah and the Bee speaks to that part of us that wants to escape our fears and be great.