The Great Debaters has the ingredients for a great motion picture: starched collars, a sweaty speakeasy, a teacher who will become a serious poet, rousing rhetoric, dog-eared Bibles, ferocious battles of wits. But there are two influences at work on this story, weighing it down like damp laundry on a line: its completely competent director, Denzel Washington, and its totally unimaginative screenwriter, Bob Eisele. Together, they take most of the bounce out of the story.

Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington), the future poet, is a professor at a small black college in east Texas. He’s smart, handsome, possibly communist (it’s 1935, okay?), and he advises the debate team. After a harrowing audition, the team is assembled: the slouchy Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), who slinks off-campus to dance at a shack in the swamp whenever he gets the chance; the baby-cheeked James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker, no relation either way), who’s the precocious offspring of another professor at the college; Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams), who’s plump and has glasses; and Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), who’s a fantastic dresser, even though there was no woman on the champion 1935 Wiley College debate team—and by the way, even if there were a woman on an earlier iteration of the team (there was, her name was Henrietta Bell), she didn’t become a lawyer, like it says in the end crawl, she became a social worker. Pardon the digression. I don’t have a problem with fictional movies messing with the facts, but The Great Debaters deliberately misleads its viewers using nonfiction conventions. What’s wrong with becoming a social worker, anyway?

The debaters are pretty good, and then they’re very good, and then they compete against Harvard (another pointless lie—it was USC). Along the way, they boldly wrestle with political intolerance, magically avoid ever having to defend a distasteful resolution, and witness a lynching. The rhythms of The Great Debaters are so smooth and the beats so momentous that the story never seems remotely real. Which is too bad, because Wiley College had some impressive debate teams.

THE GREAT DEBATERS DIR. DENZEL WASHINGTON | RATED PG-13 | OPENS TUES

Tags: denzel washington, Film, great debaters, Oprah