A new movie called What Goes Up is based in Concord in 1986, in the week just before the liftoff of the space shuttle Challenger. It has a theme of heroism and centers on a group of Concord High School students. If you think you already know this plot, you are mistaken.

The hero of this film, which begins a weeklong run today at the Somerville Theatre in Massachusetts, is not Christa McAuliffe, the Concord High School teacher who died in the space shuttle disaster. Or, at least, this story is not that simple.

The screenplay was written by Bob Lawson of Peterborough and Jonathan Glatzer of Los Angeles and adapted from a play they wrote for Andy's Summer Playhouse in Wilton. It is about a group of misfit students mourning the death of their beloved teacher, named Sam, who may have committed suicide - and may have been having an affair with a student. In some people's minds, he was an "anti-hero," Lawson said. But not to his students.

While the city is celebrating McAuliffe with a school musical and parades, the students find over-the-top ways to memorialize their hero, including stealing his coffin. And they meet New York reporter Campbell Babbitt, played by British comedian Steve Coogan, who is dispatched to Concord to cover the lead-up to liftoff.

Babbitt, who is also mourning the woman he loved, is compelled to write about the students. In the meantime, he falls for one, played by Hillary Duff, and he faces the students' attempts to turn him into their new hero.

Lawson and Glatzer wrote the play in 1996 for the Wilton playhouse to fit a summer theme of flight. They finished the work - which originally focused solely on the ensemble of students - in four days. Two years later, they wrote the screenplay, adding Babbitt's character. The script was bounced between production companies for years. In 2006, when the writers had pretty much given up, it caught the attention of Coogan and Duff.

Lawson said both were looking for quieter roles than what they had played in the past.

"This is definitely not comic and not a big performance," he said. "It's very small and modulated."

It's also dark.

Lawson and Glatzer said they approached writing the play with a certain cynicism about the celebration of McAuliffe as a hero.

"It was a terrible tragedy, but does that suddenly make her a hero?" Lawson said.

The students in the movie are at a place in adolescence where they question what they've been told, said Glatzer, who also directed the film. They feel they've been duped before.

"They're not buying into this whole make-Christa-the-cover-of-the-Wheaties-box kind of thing," he said.

As Coogan's character puts it in the movie's trailer: "We can't all be heroes. Some of us ought just to sit on the curb and clap while they go by."

The message of the movie, however, is an affirmation of the role that heroes play in the lives of the people who consider them as such - whether they be a flawed teacher who died amid scandal or one who is celebrated nationally and on the verge of becoming the first teacher in space.

Glatzer said he wants the movie to prompt conversation about why certain people are put on pedestals.

"There's no damning of anyone who thinks that Christa's a hero," Glatzer said. "It's kind of the opposite. . . . She was an incredibly dedicated educator with remarkable energy, and she was a worthy role model. But the wording of her as a hero is something that fundamentally has to be determined by an individual."

McAuliffe is not a character in the movie, which ends with the countdown to liftoff. Her death is part of the movie only in the way that it affects the viewers' frame of mind.

Sony, which is distributing the film, played down the Challenger disaster in its marketing materials, Glatzer said.

"They want to market this as a light teen comedy, and it's anything but," he said. (next page »)