Well-cast, well-acted, sentimental and plucky, “Joy: The Birth of IVF” is an encouragingly upbeat account of the labors, trials and attacks endured by the intrepid British team that set out to find “a cure for childlessness.”

It’s a story of science practiced by pioneers and science misunderstood or just plain mischaracterized by those who misunderstood it. And in this case, at least, the smart people got their way and were vindicated and lionized for it.

The script smartly shifts the focus from the two men lauded for pioneering pioneered IVF — Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy) and Robert G. Edwards (James Norton), who outlived Steptoe and became the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for this research — to to the single, qualified and contributing childless woman, Jean Purdy, who ran the lab that carried out the study, testing and impregnating.

Thomasin McKenzie brings this not-wholly-forgotten figure to life, a loner by choice and an enthusiastic young researcher who faced shunning by her mother, her church and her community for taking part in experiments the scandal-mongering British press likened to “Frankenstein.”

Jean, a nurse and embryologist, answers an ad for a lab manager with biologist/physiologist Edwards, and having the knack for capturing escaped lab mice gets her the job. As Edwards has spent the late 1960s experimenting with fertilizing mouse, rabbit and hamster eggs outside of the body, and gynaecologist and laproscopy pioneer Steptoe was pushing for less invasive laproscopic procedures for retrieving ova, they team up to begin working on IVF, in vitro fertilization — in an outbuilding of an older hospital in remote Oldhman.

The “forming the team” scenes are testy and amusing, with career outsider Steptoe not suffering colleagues of any sort gladly, Edwards close to pleading and the brash Purdy trying to shame Steptoe into signing up with insults about how no one likes him, anyway.

The script has the three seeing the future, as such screenplays often do — “You’re aware they’ll throw the book at us — the church, the state, the world. We will unite them all against us.”

But Jean sees things different.

“The mothers will back us.”

The film tracks through the glacial pace of shifting public opinion, lopsided televised debates with Nobel Prize-winning DNA pioneer James Watson (Nicholas Rowe of “Young Sherlock Holmes”) pushing his version of common sense alarmism about “abnormalities” in such babies and what would be done about that. The science establishment trots out “overpopulation” as an argument for not funding them.

Tanya Moodie plays the stern head nurse/matron who reminds one and all of what they’re fighting for, in a hospital that performs legal abortions and is working on a “cure for childlessness.”

“We are here to give women choice. EVERY choice.”

Director Ben Taylor, working from a Jack Thorne screenplay, leans into “cute” a tad too hard, playing up the spunky flirt Purdy, the crusty Steptoe and the unscrupulous, knee-jerk press’s excesses. The filmmakers underscore “test tube baby” failures with the “No no no no no no” song (“Nobody but Me”), a swimming outing by “The Ovum Club” (women who agreed to participate in the experiment) with Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song” and a moment of trial-by-error success with Lee Dorsey’s original version of “Yes We Can Can.”

When Lesley Brown (Ella Bruccoleri) received the first successful fertilized ovum transplant in ’78, I was shocked SHOCKED that they didn’t use “Knees Up Mother Brown” to musically memorialize the moment.

But cloying tendencies aside, “Joy” is a welcome feel-good movie about science, a “Hidden Figures” for IVF and the sort of movie a lot of people will take comfort in as the world’s anti-science ignoramuses, anti-vaccine rubes and anti-“expert” opportunists control most of the media megaphones these days.

Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton, Tanya Moody, Rish Shah, Joanna Scanlan, Nicholas Rowe and Bill Nighy.

Credits: Directed by Ben Taylor, scripted by Jack Thorne. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55