Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (2009) on Netflix

Plot summary

In Detroit in 1961, ten-year-old Ben Carson brings home poor marks, and his mother Sonya, who left school after the third grade, decides to act. She has Ben and his older brother Curtis learn their multiplication tables, then limits them to two television shows a week and asks for a written report on every book they read. She does not tell them that she cannot read the reports herself. The boys take to books, and Ben's grades climb from the bottom of his class toward the top. He moves to a mostly black high school, where two students bully him. A scholarship takes him to Yale, then to neurosurgery and a residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1987 he travels to Germany to meet the parents of twins joined at the head.