On their way to a nearly perfect season, the young black men playing for the Texas Western Miners don't mix well with the five white players. The school's administrators pooh-pooh the new recruits. The fans on the road are violent with racism. Somebody on the team has a heart condition. Somebody else is flunking geology. And a heavily made-up Jon Voight arrives at the end, playing coaching legend Adolph Rupp as if he were Ross Perot. But who cares? There's gospel moaning in the musical score and Motown on the soundtrack!
The title road leads to sports history: the first time five African-American starters faced an all-white team in an NCAA championship game. Along the way, the film provides a sobering sense of the adversity that the Miners faced. Yet the era never comes to life the way it should. The visceral authenticity of scenes in which the players face hostility is short-lived, and a generic must-do spirit starts up again.
The movie completely ignores the extent of the personal toll integration must have taken on the white players. Surely they must have discussed amongst themselves the world being forced to change before their eyes. Instead, they're told basically to take one for the team.
All attention to shaded characters and lively dialogue is lavished on the seven black players, who share a complicated, loving dynamic. In El Paso, when they show up at a Mexican nightclub, the film shows us something we rarely see in the movies: a handful of young African-American males looking for fun in the reasonably innocent way the white boys in ''American Graffiti" and ''Diner" did.
Each Miner is played by a charming and compelling actor. Derek Luke is Bobby Joe Hill, the brashest and most charismatic of the group. He played a similar showboat in 2004's far superior Texas football movie ''Friday Night Lights," and he's just as exciting here.
The other young actors are all more rousing than Lucas, whose yelling is one long exclamation point. ''Glory Road" skimps on the husband-and-father stuff, as these movies must, but was Haskins such a cavalier coaching machine at home, too?
''Glory Road" is certainly a tribute to Haskins's audacity and his team's mettle. But it's also a Jerry Bruckheimer production, which is to say the movie isn't built for depth. Director James Gartner follows the Bruckheimer playbook well enough (there's a lot of climactic slow motion) and he keeps ''Glory Road" on message. Bruckheimer also produced 2000's civil rights-era football hit, ''Remember the Titans," and ''Glory Road" dutifully hits most of the same crowd-pleasing notes. But this is a movie you could watch in your sleep.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
