I’ll never forget my father, the product of a classical public education, seeing a robin while driving me to elementary school and exclaiming, "Ah! The first harbinger of spring!"
Harbinger . I was in first or second grade, and a passionate, unquenchable word lust was born in me that has yet to be sated.
 
The engaging Keke Palmer plays the young spelling whiz whose mother (Angela Bassett) is preoccupied with her other, more troublesome child. (By Saeed Adyani)
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That love affair with language is evoked and celebrated with terrific warmth and honesty in "Akeelah and the Bee," a thoroughly winning family film. It turns out that the feisty 11-year-old heroine of the film, played with remarkable appeal and self-possession by newcomer Keke Palmer, had the same kind of dad as I did. And although "Akeelah and the Bee" is a fictional story about a South Los Angeles middle-schooler who overcomes obstacles to compete at the National Spelling Bee, this by turns funny, affecting tale pays homage not just to one young person’s determination and character, but to all those parents, teachers and myriad guardian angels who in real life instill the love of language in young people — and with it, the love of history, culture and learning itself.
What with the marvelous 2002 documentary "Spellbound," the equally well-regarded Broadway musical "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," the book (and 2005 movie) "Bee Season" and the upcoming documentary "Wordplay," audiences have been on something of a vocab jag of late. Forget films about 9/11: Does America really need another bee movie?
Yes, as it turns out. Or, put differently: If you enjoyed "Spellbound," which "Akeelah and the Bee" most closely resembles, you won’t find yourself at the usual cosmeticized, dumbed-down version of a much better nonfiction film. Instead, "Akeelah and the Bee" succeeds on its own terms as an exercise in several genres; this may be the first feel-good, coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water dramedy of the summer.
"Akeelah and the Bee," which was written and directed by Doug Atchison, hits all of the notes of those cinematic formulas, and like a word-slinging "Karate Kid," it features a memorable inter-generational friendship. But Atchison deploys all those tropes adroitly and with taste, resulting in a film that admittedly goes for the tear-duct jugular (isn’t there a word for that?) but earns every salty drop it extracts. In large part, "Akeelah and the Bee" works because of its uncommonly gifted leading lady. Palmer’s Akeelah is that cinematic rara avis , the kid who is cute without being too cute, sympathetic without being cloying, and believable without being tiresome.
As "Akeelah and the Bee" opens, Akeelah Anderson is on her way to school, part of South L.A.’s understaffed, underfunded public school district. Akeelah’s smart — her late father instilled in her a lifelong love of dictionaries and Scrabble — but her reward is the ridicule of her schoolmates and the benign neglect of her mother (Angela Bassett) who, not having to worry about her youngest daughter, is working hard to keep Akeelah’s teenage brother off the streets.
When Akeelah turns in yet another perfect spelling test, her principal suggests she enter the school spelling bee; if she advances to the district, regional and even national bees, she’ll bring coveted attention — and funds — to his beleaguered school. "Why would I want to represent a school that doesn’t even have doors on the toilets?" she angrily retorts, delivering one of the film’s many subtle critiques of the country’s education policies.
Observing all of this from an Olympian remove is Joshua Larabee (Laurence Fishburne), an imposing former UCLA professor who has been brought in to coach Akeelah. "They laughed because you intimidate them," he intones dramatically after challenging Akeelah at a school spelling contest. "If you had stood your ground, you would have earned their respect." Part Zen master, part John Houseman in "The Paper Chase," Fishburne’s Dr. Larabee cuts a suitably mythic figure as the Teacher Who Changed Everything, and after a few initial setbacks, soon he and Akeelah are embarking on a training as rigorous and rewarding as "Rocky" with a thesaurus. During the film’s most heartwarming montage, Akeelah involves her whole neighborhood — including the gang-banger who has been threatening to co-opt her brother — as she learns thousands of words for the national bee.
It’s that nod to the collective — the idea of victory not just as the result of individual hard work but also as the conspiracy of many supportive souls — that makes "Akeelah and the Bee" so special. And although the idea of a gang leader drilling a little girl in vocabulary may strike a romantic, even unrealistic note, it’s still a powerful one. This movie is a triumph on many levels — not least of which is its notion of triumph itself. But of its many pleasures, the most subtle and important is how it presents South L.A. — a community too often portrayed as pathologically mired in crime, drugs and violence — as strong and hardworking and full of promise. No 25-cent words needed here: "Akeelah and the Bee" is quite simply great.
Akeelah and the Bee (112 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG for some profanity.