Edward James Olmos, lately of Miami Vice fame, returns to the fervor of his independent film days (The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez et al.) as a latter-day Mr. Chips of the L.A. barrio. Stand and Deliver is the inspirational story of Jaime Escalante, whose class of borderline dropouts achieved such high scores on the AP calculus exam that they were thought by an inherently racist school system to have cheated, en masse. Olmos-as-Escalante pulls it off with a bluntness that defies the built-in clichés of the story: "The movie isn't really Rockyesque; it's dry and unsensational, so the clichés don't crush you. It's also underdramatized," Village Voice critic David Edelstein writes of this first film by Cuban-born UCLA Film School graduate Ramon Menendez. With a mixture of sarcasm and savvy (demonstrating his own potential for street-style violence not as a threat but as a password), Escalante wins over grudging hearts, and then minds. "Tough guys don't do math, tough guys fry chicken for a living," he exhorts, when he's not devising ingenious, Newtonesque demonstrations of basic calculus. As fiction, this would be as see-through as a Sally Fields vehicle; as fact (the real Escalante's record of subsequent successes rolls by in the closing credits), Stand and Deliver does.