GLORY ROAD

"Glory Road" tells the story of the first all-African American NCAA starting lineup of basketball players, at Texas Western College in 1966, as led by their groundbreaking coach Don Haskins (Josh Lucas).

Debut director James Gartner struggles with solidifying the film’s socially explosive period aspects against the exacting demands of recreating a season’s worth of hair-raising basketball games surging toward the 1966 NCAA tournament.

Josh Lucas excites the screen as Coach Haskins, but is frequently upstaged by the talented ensemble of upstart actors that include Derek Luke, Mehcad Brooks, Al Shearer, and Damaine Radcliff. Jon Voight delivers a remarkable performance as University of Kentucky’s bigoted coach Adolph Rupp. Entertaining and cathartic in spite of its faults, "Glory Road" fills an important gap in sports history.

Texas Western College is now called the University of Texas at El Paso. It’s easy to imagine that Don Haskins’s color-blind basketball coaching contributed in some degree to the school’s name change. For their part, screenwriters Christopher Cleveland and Bettina Giliois do an admirable job of capturing the turbulent social atmosphere of racism that plagued the young African American basketball players whose game skills exceeded those of their rivals.

It’s too bad that the director doesn’t know how to frame  the on-the-court action so that it resonates against the rest of the movie. Most surprising is the sloppy editing from the estimable John Wright ("The Hunt For Red October") that turns the final game of the film into a kind of fast-forward pulp accented with some glaring continuity mistakes.

Here is a movie that could have been every bit as satisfying as Gavin O’Connor’s "Miracle" (2004) which layered its Olympic hockey story with a full range of character emotion, social context, and sports action. Here, the filmmaker lets us feel some of the vehement hatred and abuse these African American basketball players suffered, but we don’t get enough of their response against it.

There is a brief period when the black players on the team shun the white players during a game. Yet we don’t see the decisiveness in their eyes that portrays their inner crisis simply because the filmmaker refuses to use close-ups.

The movie ends with a credit sequence that’s balanced with commentary from the real-life Don Haskins and several of the actual Texas Western players who contributed so famously to opposing segregation in college basketball during the NCAA season of 1966. The closure helps to compensate some for the personal revelation the film lacks.

Rated PG. 117 mins.