As a compromise she agrees to do an anonymous TV interview, only to be horrified by the media’s fixation on Khalil’s potential criminality, the white-lady interviewer hiding her prurience behind a maddening, painted-on expression of sympathy. She’s urged to go public by a local activist (“Insecure” star Issa Rae) while her mother counsels caution. Khalil’s killing is the lit fuse on the bomb that will explode Starr’s carefully compartmentalized life. To add even more unexpected perspective to the mix, Starr’s uncle Carlos (Common) is himself a cop, who will gently try to make Starr see another angle on the racist crime to which she is the only witness, before being forced to concede that “it’s a complicated world.” Long before Starr attends the fateful party where she meets childhood playmate and crush Khalil (Algee Smith), who will end the night bleeding out from bullet wounds, clutching a hairbrush that an officer mistook for a gun, there are hints of another senseless tragedy in her past. Their father Maverick (a sympathetic, broad-shouldered, heavily tattooed Russell Hornsby), first shown giving his kids “the talk” in which he drums into them the rules for surviving a traffic stop and makes them learn the Black Panther Ten-Point Program by heart, is an ex-con who took a three-year rap to protect local gangster King (Anthony Mackie), the architect of the Garden Heights drug trade. Starr’s family is a stable, loving unit, but it is also messy: Her parents canoodle openly (“their cuteness can be extra” eyerolls Starr), but her brother Seven (Lamar Johnson) is the child of another mother - meaning he, too, is often forced to choose between differing modes of blackness. Starr code-switches effortlessly between Garden Heights Starr and “Starr Version 2” - sloughing off her hoodie, swallowing any aggression that might make her seem “ghetto,” and scrubbing her vocabulary of the black slang and inflections that her white peers, including boyfriend Chris (“Riverdale” star KJ Apa) and BFF Kayleigh (Sabrina Carpenter), have no problem using.īut what seems to be a simple fish-out-of-water set-up (that does give rise to an amusing meet-the-parents scene among others) is complicated in a multitude of provocative ways.
The local high school is “a place you go to get drunk, high, pregnant or killed,” and so she attends Williamson, a largely white private school, at the behest especially of her mother Lisa (a superb Regina Hall). Starr Carter (Stenberg) is a bright, ’90s-obsessed African-American teenager with a discerning eye for Air Jordans, living in the predominantly black neighborhood of Garden Heights. Without compromising the complexity of the issues raised, or condescending to the youth of its protagonists, “The Hate U Give” strides with absorbing, intelligent certainty through the desperately dangerous, uneven terrain of racially divided America. Working from Audrey Wells’ lively if occasionally on-the-nose adapted screenplay, the great strength of Tillman’s film is a moral clarity as direct and challenging as skyrocketing star Amandla Stenberg’s wounded, courageous gaze. Entertaining, enraging, and ultimately deeply moving, “The Hate U Give” is poised to be a hit, and deserves to be. has done just that, pulling off a brilliantly modulated balancing act between dark and light, anger and optimism, white privilege mined for pointed laughs and black fury portrayed as a galvanizing force for change. But with his adaptation of Angie Thomas’ bestseller “ The Hate U Give,” George Tillman Jr.
It probably shouldn’t be possible to make a big, broad, laugh-and-cry-engaging studio movie that hinges on the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer (and how chilling it is that this ugly phrase has long since become a stale cliché).