A kid-centric underdog tale set in drawly 1977 Georgia, the United States, this film directed by a pair of women who call themselves Bert & Bertie, centers on a child played by Mckenna Grace but is made whole by Viola Davis, whose embodiment of a kid-wary adult is an essential counterweight to the cuteness surrounding her.

Grace plays Christmas Flint, a spunky 9-year-old with blonde pigtails and an obsession with outer space — where she believes, or at least hopes, her dead mother lives on. Picked on by schoolmates because she wets the bed (she doesn’t, she swears), her only friend is neighbor Joseph (Charlie Shotwell), who is more in touch with his feminine side than was generally allowed in the real-world version of ‘70s rural Georgia.

Flint fixates on the idea of sending messages out to whatever beings might exist in deep space. When she learns that NASA is recording everyday people for a record it will send off with the Voyager spacecraft — and that some local kids will be part of that project — she can barely contain herself. But NASA will select its Georgia participants at the annual Jamboree of Birdie Scouts, and the mean girls in her local Birdie troop want nothing to do with her.

So Flint starts her own troop. Having checked the Birdie guide out of the library and finding no rule limiting membership to girls, she makes Joseph her first comrade; then come the most feral bullies she knows; then the one-eyed Jesus freak Ann-Claire.

For a troop mother, she recruits Davis’ Rayleen, who, as a secretary for Flint’s luckless defense-lawyer father Ramsey (Jim Gaffigan), has a bit of time on her hands.

“I don’t get on good with little girls,” Rayleen complains. But Ramsey reminds her he can’t afford to pay her to work, and some unexplained history Rayleen has with the other troop’s leader seems to prod her into accepting the role.

All that remains is to turn this ragtag crew into official Birdie Scouts, so they can enter the talent show and win a spot on that Golden Record.

Time and again, our working-class heroes are told that they shouldn’t expect to win, and should learn to lose graciously.

Flint isn’t ready to take that advice, and neither is Rayleen, who regrets not going to law school years ago.

In the end, new friendships are the real prize, and being heard by anybody at all is as good as having your voice immortalized for beings in a far-off galaxy.(SD-Agencies)