The filmmakers don’t offer sweeping reforms or policy suggestions. But they do strive to point out that helping poor and at-risk students succeed is about more than just academics. A kid can’t focus on philosophy if he’s hungry or exhausted because he slept on a recliner outside someone’s shed. As Pepe said during a phone interview, “I think the experience that I had that I hope is in the film is that this is an educational environment, an educational culture that doesn’t say, ‘oh, those problems have nothing to do with algebra, so just stay quiet about them.’” The word he chose when someone in a pitch meeting asked him for one word to describe the film? Empathy.

Black Rock’s culture is in large part the work of the school’s principal, Vonda Viland. Seemingly tireless, Viland spends her days doling out both emotional support and tough love to the kids at the school. She picks kids up who say they don’t have a ride to school. She calls them in the morning to make sure they’re awake. She tells them she loves them. She pushes them. “If you're looking for a place to hide, this isn’t it,” she tells kids. “There’s no shame in asking for help.”

I was left wanting more background on how Viland ended up at Black Rock, and on how she copes with the stress of her job. (A scene of her jumping rope in the middle of the night offers some clues.) But the filmmakers’ decision to linger on student-centric scenes that seem to intentionally come close to dragging without actually dragging is also an effective tool for giving viewers a sense of the daily slog of life in a part of the country where opportunity and hope seem depressingly absent for many. The message is clear: There is no shortcut or easy fix for the issues with which these students (and their teachers) contend.

During a phone conversation after the film’s release, Viland told me she’d been the principal at a traditional high school previously but felt “unsatisfied,” like she was spending more time pushing paper around than actually helping kids. Students like the ones at Black Rock are full of untapped potential, she said, but too often they are painted as more of a drain than a resource. It’s no wonder, as Fulton put it, that these kids “often gravitate toward the choice of being the victim, because that’s what everyone is telling them they are.”

Consider Jennifer Coffield, a Black Rock student who confides in a teacher and Viland that she’s upset because her father yelled at her for essentially being a good student. He was upset, it seemed, that she was getting ready to graduate. Viland, in another snippet that left me wanting more information, responds by telling the girl she once found out her own father never wanted her and that she never got his acceptance, but that she did okay and so can Coffield. (Happy spoiler: Coffield ultimately earns her diploma and a full scholarship to study nursing.)