A documentary by Amanda Lipitz. Rated PG

Step is about dance like Hoop Dreams was about basketball. Both films document the struggles of African-American kids in urban America, but this new girl-powered film is much zippier, more inspiring, and more energetically hopeful.

From the outset, director Amanda Lipitz shows the Lethal Ladies of Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, as the step team is known, living in a volatile city with major racial tension. The film opens with Black Lives Matter protests around the police-custody death of Freddie Gray. Inside their charter school, the girls are held to a tall task by a team of support workers, teachers, counsellors, and coaches: every one of them must go to college.

Lipitz shows how achieving the marks they need is insanely difficult, given the pressures they face in homes wracked by poverty and dysfunction. As Blessin, the Beyoncé-beautiful but beleaguered central character, puts it early in the film: “My community is poisonous—I ain’t even gonna lie.”

In her case, her single mother deals with debilitating depression, to the point where there’s no food in the fridge for her smaller siblings. Elsewhere, bookish, bespectacled Cori dreams of earning a scholarship to a $60,000-a-year university, but the electricity’s been cut off in an apartment she shares with six little brothers and sisters. Sometimes Lipitz doesn’t reveal all that’s dragging the girls down—there’s always a sense of some holding back, possibly in the name of protecting her young subjects.

Step resolutely refuses to be bleak. The girls seem to feed off love at home, whether it’s from Cori’s enthusiastically supportive mom, who has been homeless and in women’s shelters, or Tayla’s prison-guard single mother, who serves as a kind of overly involved matriarch to all of them—much to her daughter’s embarrassment.

What’s most moving and inspirational, though, is the dedication of the school staff, always pushing them hard to do better. In one scene, Paula, a counsellor devoted entirely to getting the kids into college, tearfully pleads one girl’s case to an admissions board—before apologizing for being unprofessional. Cynics might wonder how the students will fare in college without a team of cheerleaders. But by the end of the movie, even they won’t be able to help rooting for the Lethal Ladies just as hard as that counsellor.

As for the scenes of step, where the girls push themselves to make the national championships, the hip-hop–infused, fiercely boot-stomping dance becomes a powerful physicalization of strength and resilience. (“It’s a complete erase from home,” says Blessin.)

In Charlottesville and beyond, these are dark times for race relations in the U.S. Step stands as a film strong enough to stomp out those divides.