IN its depiction of matters maritime, well-informed purists will probably find faults, goofs and technical errors in director Craig Gillespie’s film recreating the night in February, 1952, when four young US Coast Guard members took a 36-foot lifeboat to sea to rescue the crew of TS Pendleton, torn in two after colliding with another tanker in a big storm off Cape Cod.

But most people watching “The Finest Hours” won’t care a whit about such shortcomings. What will grab their attention and stimulate their adrenalin will be the giant waves that the film shows time and again completely submerging the plucky little vessel as Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) takes it out despite the pleas of his fiancee Miriam (Holliday Grainger) that she needed him to be on hand for their April wedding.

In the stern half of Pendleton, Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) is in the engine room supervising the blocking of the leaks and working out how to save the crew.

It’s a good story that Gillespie tells with obvious sincerity. The sea conditions are the creation of movie-making magic and their ferocity is pervasive.

Ashore, Miriam is bogged in a snow drift. Townsfolk come to her aid and subsequently drive to the shoreline to shine their cars’ lights to sea and give Bernie a course reference after the lifeboat’s compass was torn away (Bernie, a local lad, had worked out a heading from the wind direction).

The closing credits remember Bernie and his crew from newspaper reports of the time. The people’s onshore stuff is basically authentic. Bernie and Miriam enjoyed 57 years of marriage before he died.

Older people may remember Winston Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons on June 18, 1940: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, this was their finest hour.” Such oratory has no copyright limitation, but I can’t help feeling that quoting it for this film’s title does draw a bit of a long bow.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight