I.S.318 is an inner-city school where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level, that also happens to have the best, most winning junior high school chess team in the country. The film follows the challenges these kids face in their personal lives as well as on the chessboard.

Pierre is a ballroom-dance instructor with courtly manners whose pupils tend to be well-heeled teenagers. Partly as a dare and partly as a joke, he is offered the job of supervising a South Bronx high school detention class, where the students regard him as a visitor from the moon. They resist him, but he fascinates them, and before long, Pierre has talked them into learning a few steps. He even suggests that if they work hard enough, they might have...