Kids steal the show in film

The film tells inner-city youngsters they should embrace intelligence.
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
KANSAS CITY STAR
You would think that the documentary "Spellbound" was so good as to render superfluous any fictional treatment of spelling bees and the kids who participate in them.
But the feel-good "Akeelah and the Bee" has its own charms, not least of which is a cast of personable youngsters who steal the movie from the grown-ups.
In writer-director Doug Atchinson's generally satisfying melodrama, a young black girl in Los Angles discovers her talent as a speller and finds a much bigger world opening up to her.
Akeelah (the excellent Keke Palmer) is an underachiever at her middle school. This frustrates her principal (Curtis Armstrong) because her test scores are off the chart. He pushes her to participate in the school's spelling bee, which she wins without breaking a sweat. She finds herself reluctantly being pulled into this strange new pastime. Success is a new sensation.
But there are conflicts aplenty. For starters, in Akeelah's world, smart kids are dissed as "brainiacs." And she certainly doesn't want to get a reputation as a teacher's pet or a smart snob.
She also has conflicts with the college English professor (Laurence Fishburne) who agrees to coach her (in part to make up for his own failure in the National Spelling Bee years earlier). He's a stickler who demands Akeelah's total commitment and who won't tolerate 'hood slang in his presence: "Here you will speak properly, or you won't speak at all."
Other challenges
There are problems at home. Akeelah's widowed mother (Angela Bassett) is too weary from work to be very nurturing. Akeelah decides not to tell Mom about her quest for a national championship.
And then there are the youngsters she's up against, rich boys and girls whose parents spend thousands of dollars to hone their spelling skills. Many treat this poor girl from the wrong side of town with barely disguised contempt, though Akeelah does find a soul mate in young Javier (Juan Villareal), a sweet kid from Beverly Hills who clearly adores her.
"Akeelah" has an agenda. It argues that intelligence should be embraced, that excellence is nothing to be ashamed of. Fishburne's prof has Akeelah read from W.E.B. Dubois and Martin Luther King.
The film seems made-to-order as a motivational tool for inner-city pupils.
But it's never preachy. And it ends with a big, good dose of uplift. Before it's over, even the neighborhood gang bangers are rooting for our heroine -- along with everyone in the theater.