There’s always a mixture of anticipation and dread when preparing to watch a film about a tremendously important topic — especially when you know a fair bit about it. That’s even more so when the film is made by people who don’t hate the American Founding. When such a film is made outside of Hollywood’s confines — it increases the odds that it will be true to life but trend towards a mediocre offering soon to be forgotten.

It’s with great relief that I can report Jon Erwin’s Young Washington delivered both truth and beauty. The film featured a stunning performance by, ironically, a 22-year-old, 6’4” Londoner, William Franklin-Miller, as the eponymous leading role. On screen, we follow Washington’s mostly frustrated efforts to break into the top ranks of a highly stratified colonial society. From his militarily useful work surveying the frontier at age 16, to his formative combat service during the French and Indian War, the story is a prelude to the Revolutionary War, taking us through 1753 to 1755, when he was 21 to 23 years old.

Angel Studios employed a strong cast, with Mary-Louise Parker as Washington’s mother, Mary; Kelsey Grammer and Ben Kingley as the powerful landowners and representatives of the Crown, Lord Fairfax and Robert Dinwiddie; and Andy Serkis and Michael Benz as British officers Gen. Edward Braddock and Gen. Thomas Gage. Gage was later recalled to London, and Britain sidelined the one general who most understood America and Americans — and George Washington himself.

The film truly shines in its depiction of hardship and striving. Washington’s father, Augustine, died when George was 11, preventing his elite education in London and thrusting Washington into an early adulthood. Here we see an accurate depiction of Washington’s early life as a planter, laboring alongside 10 slaves, working to improve himself, and thirsty for acclaim and social recognition — the highest of which was denied him due to his colonial birth.

Washington’s early mistakes on the war frontier are recounted fully enough that the viewer wonders how a normal man could have recovered to try again. It’s in this cycle of resentment, ambition, action, and failure that we see the gradual, painful process of Washington’s iron resolve carburized in the crucible of life which forged the steel of his latter years. It shows a strength of character we have come to take for granted today.

Washington’s attempts to attract the affection of Sally Cary (Mia Rodgers) are especially instructive as to the strong class distinctions of the day. The dynamic between the American colonists, even landed ones, and the ruling aristocracy is shown when Sally instead marries George William Fairfax, whose father was a first cousin of Lord Fairfax, leaving Washington with his first broken heart.

And, of course, we are treated to what we expected of the film: Washington’s bravery, quick thinking, stamina, strength, and charismatic leadership — in their primordial form, before they became synonymous with the founding father.

The movie’s inaccuracies are thankfully modest, although unfortunately common for period pieces — namely, exploding cannon shell when ball or grapeshot would have been the order of the day, and an appalling lack of bayonets. One wonders whether it was a lack of time and money to train the extras or the reluctance of underwriters to cover 200 men charging at each other with 20-inch steel blades that caused the ubiquitous bayonet to be absent from their field of arms.

Lastly, though readily excusable given the film’s timeline, the storied meeting between Washington and an Indian chieftain who tried mightily to kill him took place not hours after the battle, but in 1770, 15 years after the Battle of the Monongahela.

It was at that battle that a 23-year-old George Washington had two mounts shot out from under him while four bullets tore through his coat (there’s a bullet hole through his tricorn hat in the film). In the actual encounter, as in the film, the Native American chief sought Washington out, firing 17 times at the future first president without hitting him.

Taking this as a sign of Washington being under the Great Spirit’s protection, the chieftain knew Washington was destined for greatness.

Chuck DeVore is chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a former California legislator, and a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He's the author of “The Crisis of the House Never United—A Novel of Early America.”