One of the great movie-going pleasures of 2007 can be found in a single scene in the earnest, uplifting historical drama, "The Great Debaters." Denzel Washington, one of the premiere leading men of today, and Forest Whitaker, character actor extraordinaire, finally go toe-to-toe in a big movie moment.

It's a disagreement between colleagues, two professors at tiny, all-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. They argue. They smile. They banter. It turns heated and passionate, but they keep it civil. It's exactly the way an argument between academics who have to work together should play, and the heat, twists and turns last only a minute or so.

It's a magical moment in "Debaters," a workmanlike civil-rights-history film clad in sports-drama clothes. Well acted, smartly directed by Denzel Washington, it's inspiring in all the right and righteous and predictable ways.

The "sport" here is college debate, and in the 1930s, nobody took that more seriously than Wiley College. Washington plays the team coach, Melvin Tolson, one of those teachers who strolls into the classroom, climbs up on his desk, and inspires. He recites poetry from memory.

Whitaker is Dr. Farmer, theologian, preacher, also inspiring, charging the students at this teacher's college with leading "the way out of ignorance, out of darkness."

In the 1935 Jim Crow/lynch-happy South, Wiley College is a veritable monastery where the intellectual seeds will be planted and tended for a harvest of "equal justice for all."

School is also "the only place where you can read all day, except for prison," which is why Henry Lowe (Nate Parker, very good) is there. He's a rebel, a womanizing, blues-listening liquor-drinker who doesn't quite fit in at this Methodist school. But he is the heart of the debate team.

Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett) knows just how many black, female lawyers there are in Texas and America in 1935. She aims to join their ranks, which is why she's debating. She's the soul.

And Dr. Farmer's precocious 14-year-old son (Denzel Whitaker, no relation to either star) is here because he has to be, but also because he's dying to grow up and make his mark. He's the brains, the master researcher who helps build the foundation that will take Wiley to glory.

It's a little calculating, from its obligatory juke-joint trips to the staging of the climactic debate. Washington picks up what looks like the same pipe he gave his teacher-character in "Antwone Fisher."

But The Great Debaters is history at its most entertaining, and a vivid reminder that we're all living in a country built and then rebuilt by people who turned their passion into logical, rational arguments that moved us, step by step, down the road to justice.