October Sky Review

Sputnik crosses the sky over Coalwood, West Virginia, and a coal miner's son decides he wants to build rockets. Joe Johnston stages that opening with restraint, the whole town standing out on the road looking up, and the film keeps that plainness for most of its length. Chris Cooper is the reason it holds. His John Hickam is not a movie ogre but a man who believes the mine is the only honest future on offer, and Cooper plays his disappointment as something close to fear.

Gyllenhaal, still a teenager here, underplays where a lesser actor would glow, and his best scene is not a launch but the morning he goes down the shaft himself and takes the job he swore he would never take. Fred Murphy shoots the coal country in browns and low light so that the rocket trails register as actual events. What weakens it is the machinery bolted on around the true story.

Laura Dern's Miss Riley exists to encourage and then to fall ill on schedule, the school principal is a cardboard obstacle, and Mark Isham's score pushes hardest at the exact moments the images had already earned. The father and son reconciliation arrives on rails you can see coming from a mile away.