‘The Hate U Give’ Puts the Weight of the World on Amandla Stenberg’s Capable Shoulders

It’s a sad and alarming thing to consider, that we’ve all become so familiar with the visual language of a police shooting. An unarmed black man in the driver’s seat. Those lights that begin strobing over his shoulder. The brief whoop of the siren. The volume dropping out on the rest of the world. Over the last five or so years, when the issue of police racism and brutality has been so unavoidable in the culture, this kind of scene has become shorthand.

Look no further than how Jordan Peele dealt with that shorthand at the end of Get Out. With Chris having barely fended off the predatory Armitage family from their attempts to colonize his body, it looks like he might be able to get away. And then the lights flash and the police siren whoops. In theaters across the country, people’s hearts fell into the pits of their stomach. In my theater, several audience members loudly yelped “NO!” We know how these altercations with police and black men, not to mention when there are a bunch of dead or wounded white people around. Jordan Peele almost left his movie on that note of despair. He thought better of it, and when Lil Rel Howery’s Rod steps out of the car, the reaction was jubilant relief.

There is no such relief to be found in The Hate U Give, unfortunately. Based on the YA novel by Angie Thomas, there is precious little about this story that could be considered juvenile. You almost wish there were. But director George Tillman Jr., while holding on to certain tropes of the genre, like a pervasive main-character voiceover, the prominence of a teenage romance (with Riverdale’s KJ Apa as the handsome-if-maybe-overmatched teen suitor), never flinches from making The Hate U Give seem utterly present and vital to the current historical moment.

Starr Carter, played by Amandla Stenberg, is a black 16-year-old attending prep school because her local public school had a series of violent altercations. Her parents (Regina Hall and Russell Hornsby) know the kind of bargain they’ve made by sending their little girl to a predominantly white school, and much of Starr’s early voiceover concerns her needed to code-switch from her prep school self (where she works very hard not to give anyone the chance to call her ‘ghetto’) to her weekend self (where she ducks the occasional insult about her white school friends. This all comes to a head on the way home from one weekend party, as she and her childhood best friend Khalil drive home, semi-flirting with each other, mostly just enjoying their easy, loving chemistry with one another.

And then the police siren whoops, and we can almost plot out what happens from there. Khalil is gunned down by a jittery, racist cop, with Starr as the lone witness. The story draws on Starr’s foot-in-two-worlds nature to ratchet up the tension for her character. She’s pulled in one direction to seek justice for her best friend, and to make the cops pay for their brutality to him and people who look like him. She’s pulled in another direction to keep quiet about Khalil, who is being painted in the media as a drug dealing thug. (“The Hate U Give” is a play on the letters spelling “thug.”) In defending Khalil, Starr implicates the local gang leader (Anthony Mackie), who has a past with her father. In seeking justice for her murdered best friend, she forever alters the image of her that her white prep-school friends (even well-intentioned Archie Andrews) have of her. Issa Rae makes a brief appearance as a black activist pushing for protest and response. The film, to its credit, doesn’t paint Starr as being manipulated by a false choice between Black Lives Matter’s goals and keeping her family and neighborhood safe, but there’s a tension there, between being the public face of a controversy and keeping the danger off your doorstep.

The Hate U Give paints in broad strokes, sometimes too broad for its own good. The conflicts between Starr and her folks and Starr and her friends, can be predictable. But Tillman and screenwriter Audrey Wells stick to their guns (so to speak) admirably. And best of all, they know the talent they have in Amandla Stenberg and are not afraid to place the film’s fortunes on her capable shoulders. The former Hunger Games star gives a strong, assured performance that bodes well for her acting career.

The Hate U Give is currently available to buy or rent on VOD, as well available to watch on Digital, 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD.

Where to stream The Hate U Give