In 1965, Don Haskins, men’s basketball coach at an obscure university, Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso), decided to level the playing field, so to speak, by tapping into a new source of talent: black players. The following year his squad became the first all-black starting five to win the NCAA championship.

That Texas Western’s opponent was Kentucky, coached by the very symbol of white domination of the sport, Adolph “The Baron” Rupp, almost seems to be something out of fiction. The effect of the Texas Western victory was electric and immediate, inaugurating what one historian called “the most substantial increase in integration in the history of college sports.”The very next season every conference in the Southeast and Southwest had black players.

“Glory Road,” the new film based on Mr. Haskins’s team, gets most of the facts right, but never quite succeeds in illuminating them. Played by Josh Lucas – beefier here than as Reese Witherspoon’s amiable, beer-swilling husband in “Sweet Home Alabama” – Mr. Haskins is a decent, dedicated man who never becomes self-conscious of his role in sports or social history and who is merely intent on fielding the best team he possibly can.

Very good: Affirmative action does not work in sports, and there is no reason why a coach should consider starting a player for any other reason than his ability. But surely there was some steel and fire to Mr. Haskins that made him the first coach in the South to face the inevitable storm of scorn and protest he knew would follow his decision. The script, by Chris Cleveland, Bettina Gilois, and Gregory Allen Howard, never begins to deal with this. Nor does it seem to have a clue how Mr. Haskins inspired and united his boys in the face of such adversity.

Recalling their coach for Frank Fitzpatrick’s 1999 book, “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Kentucky, Texas Western, and the Game That Changed American Sports,” Mr. Haskins’s players invariably said they hated him at the time for his unrelenting toughness. It would have been interesting to see how a white Southerner hammered discipline into young black kids, most from New York and other urban areas, back in the era of segregated sports. Instead, “Glory Road” spoon-feeds us big doses of tough love washed down with platitudes such as “It’s not about talent, it’s about heart!” and “The dignity’s inside you!” (Where else would it be?)

The film leads viewers step by step through Texas Western’s season, telling us not only when to cheer but who to boo – especially Jon Voight, as a caricature of Adolph Rupp, who, to be fair, is deserving of much scorn for the ungracious remarks he continued to make over the years about the team that defeated him. Rupp once referred to the Texas Western players as “a bunch of crooks,” and in an interview years later erroneously said TWU was “placed on probation” for recruiting violations by the 1965-66 team. Mr. Voight is reduced to playing Rupp with an unnecessary prosthetic nose, an obvious attempt to bring verisimilitude to an underwritten role.

“Glory Road” isn’t shoddy, and it isn’t offensive – except perhaps for the shamelessness of the title, which links it to the greatest movie about the American Civil War, “Glory.” But it’s so respectful of its major characters that the ironies and complexities of their story never come alive. Among the players, only Derek Luke, who stood out in “Friday Night Lights,” makes a sharp impression as an unapologetic urbanite plunked down reluctantly in a rustic Texas setting.

The film’s political simplicity may help make it a hit with a teen crowd that needs its politics and history spelled out on flash cards. Nor will it hurt that the basketball scenes are edited with an MTV-style rhythm; the one-thing-at-a-time style of basketball that was played in the mid-1960s would probably have young fans of today laughing in the aisles.

Indeed, the Miners’ play that season was, according to center David “Big Daddy D” Lattin, “More white-oriented than any team we saw in the NCAA tournament. We played the most intelligent, the most boring, the most disciplined game of all.” Like the big title fight between Jim “Cinderella Man” Braddock and Max Baer, Texas Western’s 72-65 win over Kentucky reportedly was a snooze; the director and editor supply the dramatics that history neglected. But the Texas Western game did feature the slam dunk, a relatively new play in college basketball. Ten months after TWU’s championship, the NCAA Rules Committee voted to outlaw the dunk, and the ban would last 10 years (though not in the NBA, where black players did it constantly, as if to thumb their noses at the NCAA).

Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by first-timer James Gartner – who has, on the evidence of this film, no discernible style – “Glory Road” has one truly memorable sequence, a documentary segment at the end in which the real Mr. Haskins and Pat Riley, who played for Kentucky in the 1966 championship game, reminisce and laugh about the game’s significance. Their discussion has all the genuine warmth, humor, and rough edges that have been combed out of the movie’s account of the story.

Despite the later recognition of what the 1966 Miners accomplished, there was relatively little sense at the time that history was being made. “I started my five best players,” Mr. Haskins would tell an interviewer years later. “That they were all black and that it was the first time five black players had started in an NCAA championship game meant nothing to me.” According to Mr. Riley, “As I got into the NBA and players began to speak to me about that game, I started to realize the significance of it.”

Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”