Now this is more like it.

Last year, Richard Gere starred in the absolutely dreadful “Bee Season,” a supposedly inspirational melodrama about a young girl with a talent for spelling words. I hated that movie, thought it was easily one of 2005’s very worst, and thanks to it just the thought of sitting through another movie about a little girl going to the Scripps National Spelling Bee was enough to make my skin crawl.

Well, consider that skin crawling over because freshman writer-director Doug Atchison’s new drama “Akeelah and the Bee” is easily 2006’s most warmheartedly inspirational surprise. Like “Bee Season,” this one is also about an 11-year-old girl with an incredible knack for spelling monstrously big words. Unlike that disaster, however, Atchison’s movie is a delight, joyously moving towards its (admittedly forgone) feel-good climax with both precision and skill.

The movie is a miraculous minor masterpiece. A sports saga where education, not perspiration, is the key to success and the sight of a little girl study is as thrilling as watching Rocky Balboa train for his next fight. Seeing Akeelah spell words as trickily complex as “acromegaly,” “soliterraneous” or “xanthosis” (official Scripps National Spelling Bee words not even Microsoft Word understands) effortlessly took my breath away. This movie is a celebration of education, of family, of community and, most of all, of life and of having the strength of will and the desire to live it to the absolute fullest.

It all starts at an inner-city Middle School in Los Angeles where Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer) is coerced into taking part in her school’s inaugural spelling bee by hardnosed Principal Welch (Curtis Armstrong). The bright young girl wins easily, impressing the administrator’s old friend former UCLA professor Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishburne) with her smarts. He agrees to help the headstrong student train for future bees where hopefully she’ll place high enough to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC.

The two struggle to get along at first. She doesn’t understand why she can’t talk to him in the same sort of urban slang and juvenile colloquialisms she uses with her friends; he doesn’t get why she can’t seem to grasp the importance of what it is he’s trying to teach her. Together, Akeelah and Dr. Larabee form a bond going beyond teacher and student, each finding strength within the other to help grab hold of their lives and put things on a course headed straight towards success.

Yes, “Akeelah and the Bee” really is just that straightforward. Atchison’s movie follows the sports cliché playbook beat by beat, and for those familiar with “Hoosiers,” “Rocky” or even “Major League” don’t expect to have too much trouble figuring out where this thing is going to go. There is the authority figure setting up roadblocks to the hero’s eventual success (Akeelah’s stern mother, forcefully portrayed by Angela Bassett). There is the unlikely new friend helping her see the greatness within herself (played with exuberant charm by J.R. Villarreal). And, of course, there is the single-minded nemesis standing pointedly between Akeelah and victory (a bemused Sean Michael Afable).

So then it is a given that the glory of the movie isn’t so much found in the melodrama’s rather familiar storyline but rather in the grace, subtlety and charm it uses to tell that story. Atchison doesn’t shy away from the world in which Akeelah and her family live, but then he doesn’t beat the audience over the head with it, either. There is little, if any, schmaltz on this picture’s bones, the filmmaker thankfully using his fully formed three dimensional characters to cut through the crap and keep people entertained. If anything, the only thing I can find fault in is the director's over-reliance upon Aaron Zigman’s obnoxious score. But even that doesn’t matter as much as it probably should, Atchison painting such a wondrously intoxicating picture I was able to shrug that inadequacy happily aside.

That’s easy to do when you have a cast as strong as this all working so brilliantly together. But as delightful as it is to see Fishburne and Bassett together again for the fist time since their dual Oscar nominations for “What’s Love Got to Do with It” (and it is delightful), this is pipsqueak Palmer’s show. I didn’t much care for the pintsize thespian when I first saw her in “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” (not, in all fairness, that I much liked anything about that one), but she completely stole the otherwise dreadful sequel right out from underneath her more famous costars and she does exactly the same thing here.

Granted, this one’s a much better movie than “Madea’s Family Reunion” could ever have hoped to be, and thanks to Atchison, she’s got a far more darling character to portray. Her Akeelah is at times spunky, forceful, belligerent, shy, inquisitive, fidgety; many times all of the above. Most of all, though, she’s smart and willing to fight for the things dearest to her. Sometimes that’s winning the spelling bee, other times that’s her mother’s happiness, and sometime it is even the ecstasy of a father wrongfully living his own dreams through the exploits of a child. Palmer hits every one of these notes spot-on, the film impossible to imagine without her.

For me, the most delightful thing about watching “Akeelah and the Bee” is sitting in a theater and experiencing it with a wide-eyed audience. There is something downright exhilarating about observing an auditorium full of people scream, shout and cheer for a little girl spelling big long words. This alone makes the movie worth the price of admission, worthy of applause and commendation. Like Akeelah herself, the movie is a winner, a big bright shiny success story that not only knows how to spell the word “classic,” it earns that very designation as an adjective, too.