Benjamin Carson

The Benjmin Carson Story is a made-for-TV movie that seems tailor-made for the times in which we live. With its core story of a poor boy overcoming tremendous obstacles to become a transformative figure in his profession and the world, the biography, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as the world-famous Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, should be perfectly in sync with the Barack Obama zeitgeist.

Carson's saga starts in Detroit with an older brother, a single mother given to bouts of depression and a father who had abandoned the family. Bennie, as he was then called, is an underachiever in school. And unlike many TV movies about people who have lived exemplary lives, the TNT documentary-drama avoids the deadly mistake of treating its character like a saint.

In Carson's case, it led him to Yale and a residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. And let me praise Carson and the filmmakers one more time for not pulling punches. The film includes some horrible, ugly, jarring moments of racism in which a teaching doctor sought to humiliate and intimidate his only black intern. As marvelous an institution as Hopkins is today, it does have a horrible history of racism, and that is part of the story, too.