This was one of the sweetest, coming of age stories I'd seen for a long time. What makes it even more fascinating is that it is a true story. The story of Homer Hickam and his fellow "rocket boys" from the mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia..

Homer is the youngest son of the mine superintendent and until the first Sputnik satellite roars across the sky, his life was on track for him to become a miner, like his father before him, like his grandfather before him and so on. Few escaped that future in the coal mining company towns of that era. In the song "Sixteen Tons", the phrase "...I owe my soul to the company store" is very telling about just how much the miners' lives were controlled by their employer.

The flight of Sputnik changes everything. Homer, who has only been a mediocre math student up until that moment, decides that he is going to launch a rocket of his own and someday work with Dr. Robert Goddard, who at that moment was running the United States attempt to launch a rocket into space to match the Soviets. Homer gets his friends to go along with his scheme, and then talks the school's nerdy genius into throwing his considerable intelligence into the project.

From their first launch attempt, a resounding failure to their first success, the "rocket boys" become a local object of curiosity, derision and pride, all at once. Many of the members of the small mining town think what the "boys" are doing is worth supporting.

The support of a science teacher, her illness, an accident involving Homer's father and other subplots give the film only some of the depth and complexity of the memoir on which it is based. While knowing that no one single movie could capture everything in Mr. Hickam's autobiographical tale, there were things in it I'd have enjoyed seeing on the screen.

An uplifting tale, replete with cogent dialogue and excellent visuals, October Sky is one of the most underrated films of the year.