SOMETHING TO STAND FOR WITH MIKE ROWE

Here is the decision. Mike Rowe — TV personality, raconteur, and motivational speaker — has made a stirring, inspiring, superb documentary just in time for July Fourth. He tells re-enacted patriotic stories about the Founding Fathers, forgotten soldiers, two Medal of Honor recipients, a future President, two Supreme Court Justices, and even a word of advice the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., once gave a young singer. It celebrates liberty, patriotism, duty, honor, and sacrifice, and it does so with real energy.

There are a few cautions. The film fudges a handful of historical facts. It has re-enacted, sometimes slightly bloody, war violence, a few light obscenities, and a humorous but somewhat off-color story about a rancher and his bulls. For those reasons, parents of younger and older children should exercise judgment.

So: if you love American history and want your family to feel a renewed spirit of patriotism, this one is well worth seeing on the big screen. Just weigh the war scenes and the earthier humor for your youngest viewers.

Patterned after newsman Paul Harvey's Rest of the Story, this documentary hands the microphone to Mike Rowe, who tells a string of true American tales in his usual informal, passionate manner.

He opens on the shores of Tripoli in 1805, then ranges across the centuries — Medal of Honor recipients, a duel two decades before the Civil War, three forgotten signers of the Declaration of Independence, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more. Along the way, Rowe visits America's monuments and Arlington Cemetery, and lets a few veterans speak. The rest of each story is his to tell.

Four stars, and here is what they mean. Mike Rowe wrote and produced this film, and he infuses it with an energetic style that carries you from one story to the next. The material is well chosen and genuinely moving — one standout follows two teenage soldiers whose bravery delayed a major British bombardment of a fort protecting Baltimore in the War of 1812, an action that may have kept the United States from losing that war.

The one asterisk is accuracy. Rowe fudges a few historical facts — in the Tripoli segment, for instance, he leaves out the hundreds of mercenaries who fought alongside Lt. Pressley O'Bannon's Marines, and the Army lieutenant who commanded the land campaign. It's a storyteller's shorthand, not a fatal flaw, and it doesn't dim what is a stirring, inspiring, superb piece of work.

This is a film with a very strong moral and patriotic heart. It celebrates American values — liberty, equality, civil rights, the Declaration of Independence, duty, honor, and service to country — and it means every word. Woven through the stories are strong redemptive elements: again and again, men lay down their lives, or risk them, to save others. That impulse is one Scripture honors directly.

The film's patriotism is unabashed, and most of what it exalts aligns with a biblical vision of courage, sacrifice, and honoring those who serve. There are brief glimpses of two politically correct signs from the 1963 Civil Rights march favoring big-government policies of "full employment" and minimum wage laws — a minor note that discerning viewers will simply register and move past.

What the film keeps returning to is sacrifice: the willingness to give everything for others. That longing points beyond any nation to the One who defined it. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

Mike Rowe has made something rare: a documentary that's both superb and genuinely stirring, a celebration of sacrifice and service worth watching as a family. Mind the war violence and the earthier humor for your youngest, and know it takes a few liberties with history. But our answer stands, the same one we opened with: worth the trip — ages 10 and up.