His constant balancing act of preoccupation and laser focus is the film’s strongest suggestion of a complicated inner life. The hostile setup has a borderline cartoonish quality to it, but something more nuanced unfolds between Katherine and the group’s director, Al Harrison (Costner, persuasive). Mitchell ( Kirsten Dunst) tells her unapologetically. “They’ve never had a colored in here before,” personnel supervisor Mrs. She gets a chilly welcome from the group’s executive assistant (Kimberly Quinn) and a quietly belligerent one from lead engineer Paul Stafford ( Jim Parsons). Henson’s Katherine, the only person on-site with a knack for analytic geometry, joins the Space Task Group, although “joins” is something of an overstatement. Her supervisor ( Olek Krupa) recognizes her talent and urges her to sign up for the engineer training program - no simple feat in the Jim Crow South, but a challenge that she ultimately takes on, despite the misgivings of her husband ( Aldis Hodge). Mary Jackson ( Monae), the mouthiest and most demonstrative of the three friends, is thrilled to be placed on the team working on the Mercury capsule prototype. From those quarters, Katherine’s friend and colleague Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer) supervises the group without benefit of that official designation or the salary that would go with it, sending the “colored computers” on assignments around the research facility. A math prodigy - as a prologue set in 1926 West Virginia illustrates - she’s a member of the West Computing Group at Langley, 20 African-American women who are “computers,” in the lingo of the day, segregated from the white computers in the East Group and housed in a dingy basement office (one of the many evocative sets in Wynn Thomas’s production design).
In this rallying cry for STEM girls everywhere, Henson plays the adorably bespectacled Katherine Goble (later Katherine Johnson).
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