And yet Hidden Figures, ultimately, celebrates numbers. Not just as tools for understanding the world, but as instruments for making it better. Get the girl to check the numbers. Because lives are at stake, and that fact, right now, transcends everything else, and “the girl”—Katherine Johnson—is objectively better with those numbers than anyone else around. And what Hidden Figures also knows—and what the book that occasioned the film knows, as well—is that numbers, when they can be freed of their human freight, are leveling. They do not care about one’s gender. They do not care about one’s creed. They do not care about the color of one’s skin. They can be used by anyone who cares to learn their ways. “Mathematics,” the scientist Ellie Arroway puts it in Contact, “is the only truly universal language.”

Hidden Figures tells a story of the early American space program, which is also to say that it tells a story of the boring bureaucracy that is so often required to make history. Katherine Goble, later Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), is, like her good friends Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), a calculator at NASA, doing the work that machines would soon come to do. Goble is a prodigy, however, and her gifts, thus far sorely underutilized, finally meet the moment with the mathematical demands of the Mercury program: NASA needs someone skilled at geometry to help to calculate the flight trajectories that will make the difference between life and death, and between progress and tragedy.

Katherine is black. She is a woman. She is a single mother. She is, in short, many of the things that Americans living in the still-segregated Virginia of the 1960s were supposed to, to the extent they possibly could, avoid being. NASA, however, is desperate—to solve the problem it has set for itself. To beat the USSR. To inspire. To win. The agency needs someone who gets the math—indeed, as Goble’s eventual boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), repeatedly tells his team at the Space Task Group, the agency needs someone who can invent the math. NASA needs, although it takes far too long to realize it, Katherine Goble.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, as it were, and for the NASA of that segregated Virginia, the “desperate measures” in this case involve giving a black woman a chance to check the numbers. And once that woman is given a chance … her genius becomes too apparent to ignore. Via the numbers—and, of course, via the prodigious mathematical mind that is housed in the body of a woman—the arc of history moves, little by little, until finally, physics being what they are, it bends. What is that arc, after all, if not another geometric equation?

Hidden Figures, to be clear, isn’t an idealized representation of progress’s march forward. “Desperate measures” is a decidedly suboptimal way for people to win the most basic measures of equality. Goble’s fate—which is, in this case, also John Glenn’s, and Al Harrison’s, and the nation’s—rests in the hands of people who are so myopic in their desire to win the space race that they are willing to put aside their feelings about race of a different form. Harrison may be less inclined to tolerate the “that’s the way it is” explanations that other characters offer in their attempts to justify—and, indeed, to absolve—NASA in its endorsement of segregated bathrooms, lunchrooms, and coffee pots; that disinclination, however, is an extremely poor substitute for true heroism. Hidden Figures’s narrative trajectory involves not just progress that emerges, too often, from pettiness, but also thematic elements of the white savior, and of a culturally enforced tiara syndrome. All those things effectively temper the idealism of its message.