A class act such as “The Help” is rare enough in Hollywood. Coming at the tail end of summer blockbuster season, it’s almost unheard of.

“The Help” is the sort of film that studios typically save for the holiday prestige season in November or December, when Academy Awards voters start thinking ahead to the films they want to anoint.

Come awards time, many of them likely will be thinking of “The Help,” whose remarkable ensemble of women offers enough great performances to practically fill the actress categories at the Oscars.

From its roots as a collaboration between lifelong friends Kathryn Stockett, who wrote the best-selling novel, and Tate Taylor, the film’s writer-director, through the pitch-perfect casting of Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and their co-stars, “The Help” simply seems to be blessed.

It’s hard to imagine a better movie coming out of the screen adaptation of Stockett’s tale of friendship and common cause among black maids and an aspiring white writer in Jackson, Miss., in 1963.

With frizzy hair, formless, unpolished fashion sense, and an earnestness that feels born out of decency and large-mindedness, Stone is ideal as Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, the Ole Miss graduate who comes home to Jackson dreaming of a writing career in New York.

Advised by a Manhattan publisher to try something daring, Skeeter convinces Aibileen Clark (Davis) to share stories of her life as a black maid cleaning up after white people and raising their children.

Soon Aibileen’s friend, the outspoken Minny (Spencer), is confiding her experiences to Skeeter. As racial tension and violence erupts throughout the South, more maids step forward to join the writing circle and tell of the hardships, humiliations and occasional subversive triumphs they have experienced under their white employers.

Stone, Davis and Spencer forge something quite beautiful, a sense of sisterhood and equality that unfolds with ease and grace, never feeling forced or untrue to their era and circumstances.

As Skeeter’s old pal Hilly, the town’s autocrat of racial propriety, Bryce Dallas Howard is truly scary, playing against her usual sweet type. Howard’s Hilly and some of her squealing, cloying cronies at times seem like caricatures of ’60s young wives and mothers. Yet Howard really goes for it, reveling in her character’s self-righteousness.

Even considering Chris Columbus directed the first two “Harry Potter” movies and made a string of other hits, producing “The Help” may be the best thing he ever did for Hollywood. It’s a far better film than anything Columbus has worked on before.

And it’s a far better film than Hollywood normally churns out this time of year, one that deserves to linger into awards season.