Dennis Quaid, left, is coach Ben Schwartzwalder and Darrin Dewitt Henson is legendary player Jim Brown in The Express.

Universal Studios / Chuck Hodes

It’s fall. Time for another football movie, preferably one that has grit and heart as key ingredients as well as being inspirational to boot.

This year it’s The Express, which handily fulfills all the requirements and provides us with a civics and history lesson as well.

The Express is the courageous and bittersweet story of Ernie Davis, who used his talent on the football field to overcome the adversities of growing up in a time of great prejudice in the United States to become the first African-American to win the prestigious Heisman Trophy, honoring the most outstanding player in collegiate football.

Ernie Davis who? True, most people have never heard of Davis, unlike Jim Brown, who preceded Davis at Syracuse University and later went on to a stellar career in professional football and then movies. In The Express, Brown becomes a sort of guardian angel to the talented Davis, helping recruit him to the Syracuse squad for coach Ben Schwartzwalder (Dennis Quaid). The guardian angel point is hammered home late in the film when Brown (played by Darrin Dewitt Henson) turns up, surrounded by a bright light, to spur Davis back onto the field at a low point during a game. For a moment one wonders whether the scene is all a figment of Davis’ imagination.

Although the film centers on football and Davis’ rise to the top at a time when the civil rights movement was only beginning to take root and segregation was the law in the South, director Gary Fleder’s film may also be an eye-opener to some young people in the matter-of-fact way it presents the racism faced by black people in the 1950s and early ’60s in the United States. We see it depicted in the film’s opening sequence, set in 1949. Ten-year-old Ernie and a cousin are collecting bottles along the railroad tracks outside their Pennsylvania town when they’re surrounded by a gang of young white bullies who want the two to get off their turf. It’s at this point that Ernie chooses to flee with his bags of bottles, demonstrating the whirlwind speed and bouncy leaps that later would serve him so well on the football field.

Cut to 1957. Ernie’s talent has not gone unnoticed at Syracuse, where coach Schwartzwalder is looking for someone to fill the shoes of the graduating Jim Brown. Despite his star status on the football field, Brown has not had an easy time of it on the mostly white campus and at first is reluctant to help recruit Ernie. But he sees the lad’s talent and wants to give him an opportunity at a good college. Before long, Ernie has left his cozy home life and finds himself on the field in tough training sessions that the coach runs like a Marine boot camp

What follows is a fairly standard, though well-acted, biographical film about a football player — his on-the-field successes, his clash with the hardheaded but fair coach, his blooming romance with a pretty student from a nearby college, his friendship with a fellow African-American player (Omar Benson Millar), a lumpish guy who offers moral support and advice to Ernie as well as comic relief to the film. Fortunately, The Express doesn’t trade on a lot of sports movie clichés. But the thing that really sets the film apart from all its familiar ingredients is that it underlines the racism that existed in the United States in those days.

Sometimes Charles Leavitt’s script, based on a book by Robert Gallagher, is rather heavy handed in its depiction of racism, even as it bends over backwards to present Ernie’s family as a collection of saints. It seems determined to deliver a history lesson by re-examining American racism, something that was last explored so well in the football film Remember the Titans in 2000.

Thus, Ernie’s arrival at Syracuse is greeted with sidelong, disdainful glances from students and faculty, as though he had just landed in a spaceship. The coach warns him against taking any interest in white girls. A cousin tries to attract him to the blossoming civil rights movement, followed soon by black-and-white newsreel images of early demonstrations at segregated lunch counters and the like. When the Syracuse team plays a game at the Cotton Bowl, the Dallas hotel at first refuses to take in the team’s three black players; racial slurs are hurled by their opponents and by the Texas team’s fans. In a year when Barack Obama seems within striking distance of the presidency, all this may seem incredible and surprising to some young moviegoers.

But the Ernie Davis story is well played, too. Rob Brown delivers a subtle and sensitive performance as Ernie, a young man trying to pick his way through the minefield of racism — both blunt and curtained — and, like so many college kids, find out who he really is and where his future lies. It’s fun to watch him sliding magically past the opposing team, leaping gracefully over players who have fallen in front of him. When members of an opposing team try to take advantage of his injured hamstring by smashing into his weakness, then pummeling him when he’s on the ground, he takes it with stoic courage and a determination to come back stronger against them. It’s that inner courage that Brown brings to the role, as well as a ready smile and a boyish awkwardness when Ernie is trying to interest a pretty girl, that win one over.

Quaid makes the coach an intelligent man who brings a sense of fair play and understanding to his team. Clearly, he also has talent and a will to succeed, qualities that make him not only a strong leader, but a father figure as well.

The Express, whose title is taken from Ernie’s nickname of “The Elmira Express” because of his speed and agility, gives Ernie heroic qualities. Yet he’s also down to earth enough to be human. There’s a reason why many people don’t know the Ernie Davis story. After all, this is a bittersweet tale. So despite moments of stand-up-and-cheer energy, there’s a realization in the end that every person is only too human. And that’s what makes the film so real and so sobering.

****The Express

Starring: Rob Brown, Dennis Quaid, Darrin Dewitt Henson, Omar Benson Miller.

Rated: PG, contains football violence, profanity, racial slurs, sexuality.

mjanuson@projo.com