Starring Josh Lucas and Derek Luke. Rated PG.

Difficult as it is to picture basketball as a sport not dominated by tall African-Americans, Glory Road is here to remind us of a time-shockingly recent, in fact-when the colour bar was set higher than any basket.

The film, which shakes off its Disney sugarcoating as it moves along, centres on the real-life figure of Don Haskins (an impressively focused Josh Lucas), a high-school coach given the chance to put together a basketball team for Texas Western, an impoverished community college not known for academic achievement or athletic victories. When he can't get the white players he's after, Haskins realizes his only advantage will come from letting the "coloured" kids play.

At the time, in the summer of 1965, there was already an unofficial integration policy, as a crusty old-timer (Red West) explains: "One at home, two on the road, and three if you're losin'?". The new coach is determined to break that rule by recruiting enough black players, mostly from northern schools and playgrounds, to have a strong starting team. The school's skittish patrons are worried about turning the NCAA into the NAACP, although their trepidations disappear when the team starts winning.

Near the top, in the able hands of first-time director James Gartner, the movie soft-pedals the entrenched racism of small-town Texas. (It was shot mostly in El Paso and Louisiana.) Instead, Glory Road initially focuses on the young coach's hard-edged ambitions, giving Lucas his best star turn to date. Emily Deschanel also makes a strong impression as his wife and mother of their two small boys, despite the part being seriously underwritten.

Likewise struggling to be recognized amid the action-which becomes more intense, not to mention violent, as the team tours-are Derek Luke and Damaine Radcliff as hot-dogging players, along with Tatyana Ali as the gal who slows down the fast-handed Luke. Jon Voight has an effective cameo as Adolph Rupp, coach of the killer Kentucky team expected to uphold the master race.

The film is heavy on expository dialogue, as you might expect, and as the playoffs heat up the filmmakers throw in increasing amounts of modern basketball moves, such as anachronistic slam-dunking, and MTV-style smash cutting. But in the end, the disjuncture between then and now doesn't feel all that wrong; if just a few of today's children come to see 1965 as not that long ago, this Road will have been well worth taking.