I’m not breaking new ground here, but racism’s just plain nuts.

And it takes the kind of segregation and discrimination as depicted in director Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures to illustrate that point in full, glorious detail. In it, a brilliant mathematician (Taraji P Henson) has to walk half a mile to use a bathroom for ‘coloreds’, because the bathroom near where she works is for whites only. So it’s a full mile return journey so she can pee nowhere near her white colleagues. At first, the absurdity of this situation is played for mild laughs by Melfi, and you kind of get where there can be some dark humour generated from the ludicrous notion of this kind of discrimination. But it’s only when Henson gets to let loose in a short, sharp, and enraged soliloquy about why she’s away from her desk for so long that the ethereal power and generational pain of this society rings as true as it does.

Hidden Figures is a great work of crowd-pleasing entertainment, very well written, superbly performed and handled with consummate grace (from the director of the little seen but first-rate St Vincent). The title’s got a double meaning, in that the three principle characters in this true story have been all-but hidden from the collective consciousness in the story of the Apollo missions, and that it takes/took a certain kind of mathematical genius to find the right numbers, the right equations, and the solutions to them, to allow Gus Grissom, John Glenn et. al. to fly into space.

There’s a lot to recommend here, from the three central performers (Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae), as well as a smart, assured supporting turn from Kevin Costner, and a small cadre of new songs for background effect by the film’s co-producer Pharrell Williams. Henson has the lion’s share of the larger acting moments; she’s great, and carries the film with tremendous grace. Although it’s Octavia Spencer’s sturdy, ‘no fuss’ supporting turn seems to have garnered a bulk of the accolades. Janelle Monae, who up until this and Moonlight was a daring and original recording artist, has the kind of screen presence from which stars are born. Watch this space. Kevin Costner gets to once again show what a good actor turned movie star can do when given the right material.

Its message, while clear (and not really that subtle) is that the kind of prejudice which found itself (and finds itself) rampant through American (generally most western) society allows for greatness to be suppressed at the expense of the comfort of an ill-informed majority. We learn through this film that if it wasn’t for these discriminated-against women, them fellows with ‘the right stuff’ might never have gotten to space, to the moon, beyond.