“Young Woman and the Sea” is about the inspiration for “Nyad,” the American swimmer who became the first woman to swim the English Channel and thus upended notions of “the weaker sex” in sports.

Norwegian director Joachim Rønning (“Kon-Tiki,” the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie) and a mostly-European cast tell this All American story in that plucky, old fashioned Disney style — with great obstacles, sketchy, archetypal villains and all of America watching, or listening on the radio as our heroine makes her attempt.

It’s “Iron Will” in the water, “The Greatest Game Ever Played” with a different manner of Brit as the villain, “Cool Runnings” without the Jamaicans or the laughs.

Daisy Ridley of the “Star Wars” universe plays Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle, the New York child of German immigrants (Jeanette Hain, Kim Bodnia) who survives a near-fatal bout of measles to find her true home in the water.

The Jeff Nathanson script — he co-wrote “Catch Me If You Can,” and Rønning’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel– of her life stuffs a lot of obstacles in her way in early scenes, many of them montages. She overcame measles, growing up German-American during World War I and in an era when women were only just being allowed into select “strenuous” sports.

Getting to the Olympics in Paris in 1924 as a swimmer was seemingly a fluke, as America’s sexist Amateur Athletics Union — its name is changed in the movie — wanted to ban women from competing altogether.

Glenn Fleshler plays the athletics mogul who first recruits Trudy to the U.S. team, then saddles her with a Scottish trainer, Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), hampering her Olympics training and then going out of his way to keep her from doing what he was never able to accomplish — swim the English Channel, “the greatest challenge in sports.”

Her sister Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) lays out the stakes for women, then and now.

“People don’t want us to be the heroes,” she says. “They don’t want us to do anything.”

Early attempts at publicity have photographers and reporters wanting to know, “But does she bake? I’d really like to see (a shot of her) in the kitchen.”

Trudy and Meg’s father (Kim Bodnia) is determined to arrange their marriages to nice German immigrant boys.

Ridley brings her stiff-upper-lip pluck and good swimmer’s form (“American Crawl”) to Trudy, a woman who responds to her “real” coach’s (Sian Clifford) encouragement, progressing from “She swims like a horse with two broken legs” to championships.

Cute bits of business have Trudy swimming from Manhattan to New Jersey at night to win a bet and get sponsored for her Channel attempt, and the grim labor and challenges of long distance swimming is showcased — tides and cold temps and damned jellyfish — with skill and suspense, much as it was in “Nyad.”

The period detail is quite good here, as Trudy faces long medical odds, then long financial ones, then long athletic odds as America tracks her far-away-attempt via the radio and news service reporting of the day.

The players make a good show of overcoming a quintessentially corny script to suggest genuine determination to change the way the world looks at women and authentic conservative stone-walling and sabotage standing in the way.

Eccleston and Fleshler are practically silent cinema villains. You can tell just by looking at them their intentions.

Ridley, Clifford, Cobham-Hervey and Jeanette Hain, who plays the mother who set all this in motion by vowing that her girls would know how to swim, unlike the female victims of a New York ferry disaster from their childhood, are terrific.

Yes, the script is apparently showing us the 1904 General Slocum disaster, which took a terrible toll on the German American community at the time. “Young Woman and the Sea” has Trudy witness the smoke and hear the fire engines in 1914. That accident happened before she was born. Other incidents in the script appear exaggerated and historically indefensible.

“Young Woman and the Sea” is more “The Disney Version” of Trudy’s life, times and challenges than a literally “true story.” But its core truths are unchallenged and its message resonates to this day.

There are women, ready to achieve and excel at new endeavors. And there’s always somebody there, often several somebodies who are often men, to tell them they can’t even try.

Rating: PG, a little anachronistic swearing

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Stephen Graham, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Kim Bodnia, Sian Clifford, Jeanette Hain, Glenn Fleshler and Christopher Eccleston

Credits: Directed by Joachim Rønning, scripted by Jeff Nathanson, based on the book by Glenn Stout. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 2:09