The film, written and directed by Richard LaGravenese (best known perhaps as the writer of The Fisher King and The Bridges of Madison County), is based on The Freedom Writers Diary, a collection of essays about life in the inner city written by the students of Wilson High in Long Beach, California—and while the book may have been conceived and compiled by English teacher Erin Gruwell (played by Hilary Swank), the stories it tells are ultimately those of the students themselves.

Hilary Swank as Erin Gruwell, a young teacher in a difficult classroom

LaGravenese honors the movie's origins by opening not on Erin, but on one of her students-to-be, a Latina teenager named Eva (April Lee Hernandez) who has witnessed a drive-by shooting and the arrest of her father, and has taken a beating as part of her own initiation into gang life—all before her freshman year in high school.

Although these events are depicted in chronological order, they feel like a flashback, partly because we hear Eva narrate these events in what we gather is a passage from the diary that she will eventually write for Erin's class. And so this sequence unfolds as tragedy, but it also has an element of hope, because we are witnessing these events through the eyes of a young woman who is finding her voice; by reflecting on her circumstances, she will, hopefully, be able to rise above them.

Students are figuratively and literally divided in their distrust

The film then turns to Erin Gruwell herself, who shows up for her first day of school full of enthusiasm and not a little naïve. The students assigned to her class are troublemakers and deadbeats, at least in the eyes of the authorities, and Erin hasn't even finished the first roll call of the year before a fight breaks out. As the school year progresses, Erin's efforts to connect with her students—for example, by using a Tupac Shakur recording to explain "internal rhymes"—simply backfire, when they reject her as a poseur who doesn't understand what their life is really like.

Then, one day, one of Erin's students draws a racist caricature of one of her other students and passes it around the class. Seeing the picture, Erin turns indignant and lectures her class on the perils of prejudice—only to find that almost none of them have ever heard of the Holocaust. This gives her an idea: What if she could get her students to read Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, and to write their own diaries as well, bearing witness to the horrors around them just as Anne did?

Erin has a word with Andre (played by Mario)

It is tempting to compare scenes like this to that moment in To Sir, With Love where Sidney Poitier dumps a bunch of textbooks on the floor and declares that they are useless to his students, who must learn how to survive in the adult world instead. Erin does embark on a series of lessons and extracurricular activities which have an empowering effect on her students, but she never forgets she is an English teacher; when her students propose writing letters to Miep Gies, the woman who sheltered Anne Frank, Erin reminds them that their letters will be marked for proper grammar and punctuation first, so they should be prepared to write more than one draft.

The screenplay by LaGravenese does not completely sidestep cliché; Erin's father (Scott Glenn) is little more than the typical doubting parent who comes around in the end, and the film gives us two-dimensional, easy-to-despise villains in the form of a rival English teacher (John Benjamin Hickey) and a bitterly resentful department head played by Vera Drake's Imelda Staunton (who will soon play yet another evil, bureaucratic educator, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).

Swank with the real-life Gruwell on the set

But most of the other characters are portrayed with warmth and humanity. There obviously isn't time to get into the life story of every one of Erin's students, but several—such as the aforementioned Eva, or Marcus (Mercy Street's Jason Finn), a black student who insists to Erin that he and his classmates are living in a "war"—have their moments in the spotlight, some of which are quite moving.

Patrick Dempsey is also effective as Erin's husband; he's funny and supportive when she begins her job and can't find support anywhere else, but feels increasingly alienated as she spends less and less time at home, finding fulfillment in her students and, it seems, not in their relationship. It would have been easy for the film to "take sides" in the breakdown of their marriage, but to its credit, it does not.