October Sky

(Universal)

Based on the autobiography of former NASA technician Homer Hickam, and set during the late 1950s in a sleepy West Virginia coal-mining community, this film focuses on a quartet of high-school geeks who, inspired by the Soviets' launch of Sputnik, spend their after-school hours immersed in rocketry. Homer (Jake Gyllenhaal) dreams of space flight, college, and a life beyond the coal mines; Laura Dern is the schoolteacher who gives the boys the necessary encouragement to enter the big national science fair.