The perfect, white skinned, wealthy American Dream that has been already achieved by those of Starrs. Taking two perspectives from that of a rich life to those of the everyday hood one, both only trying to get a better life with different types of struggles. Russell Hornsby, as Starr’s reformed gang-banger dad, is similarly commanding. The Hate U Give is another take into the society that we, the youth, live in today. At each turn, Stenberg is utterly magnetic, able to nimbly hop from sitcom lightness to wrenching emotion. What’s more, as Starr’s status as a sole witness leaves her alienated from her school friends (and brings the attention of both Issa Rae’s Black Lives Matter activist and Anthony Mackie’s menacing local druglord), the film forgoes easy answers about assimilation and the different forms racism can take. Director George Tillman Jr ( Notorious) renders both the shooting and Starr’s ensuing grief with an unvarnished rawness. It’s here that The Hate U Give truly impresses with its unflinching power and admirable complexity. And the lightness of these early moments increases the impact when - as he drives her home from a party - Starr’s childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith) is shot by a policeman during a traffic stop. But an able cast (including The Deuce’s Dominique Fishback as Starr’s wayward Garden Heights friend) help keep things bouncing along. There’s a thinkpiece-ready bluntness to these establishing scenes, as they introduce us to Starr’s family, her white boyfriend (KJ Apa) and the subtle prejudice in her white friends’ repeated attempts to be “street”. The film forgoes easy answers about assimilation and the different forms racism can take. After she witnesses a police officer shoot her unarmed best friend, she's torn between her two very different worlds as she tries to speak her truth. Teenage Starr (Amandla Stenberg) lives a dual life appeasing both her local black friends and the privileged white kids at her private school. Starr Carter ( Amandla Stenberg from, funnily enough, The Hunger Games) is a black teenager who, as her narration tells us, has grown adept at oscillating between two selves the street-smart character she shows her black friends in her Garden Heights neighbourhood and the peppy, meek girl she plays for the benefit of white private school pals who won’t accept her if she acts “too ghetto”. Raised in a poverty-stricken slum, a 16-year-old girl named Starr now attends a suburban prep school. And it only serves to amplify the effect of a genuinely dark, stunningly bold and utterly vital look at race relations in modern America.īased on US first-time author Angie Thomas’s 2017 bestseller (which, in a nod to the urgency of its themes, has gone from page to screen in just over 18 months), the core story is an impressively deft melding of the personal and the political. There’s no such protective distance in The Hate U Give. But, generally, these stories play out in speculative sci-fi futures or worlds touched by fantasy and magic. Historically, Young Adult blockbuster successes have been famed for the unexpected darkness of their subject matter, whether it’s the dystopian ritual slaughter of The Hunger Games or the, um, dystopian ritual slaughter of The Maze Runner.
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