‘BLACK GIRL MAGIC’ ANN HORNADAY
Meet Amandla Stenberg, Hollywood’s next big thing
On a recent visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, actress Amandla Stenberg made a beeline for Watching Oprah, an exhibit dedicated to the TV-iconturned-all-of-it-icon.
“Oprah was very integral in my household,” she said. “My mom used to be a journalist ... She worked at Elle magazine and then moved into celebrity journalism. The irony is not lost on me.”
Stenberg had come to the museum for an hour or so while her new movie, The Hate U Give, was being screened for a group of high school students at the National Museum of American History around the corner. After trading a pair of skinny stilettos for comfier combat boots, she noted that her mother brought back a souvenir sweatshirt from the African American museum after a visit to Washington and that Stenberg wore it the entire time she was shooting the film. “So it’s kind of like a fullcircle moment for me,” she said.
This moment is full-circle in other ways. Stenberg, who turns 20 next week, had a breakout role in 2012’s first instalment of The Hunger Games as Rue, a doomed young tribute. But she’s on the cusp of becoming even better known with The Hate U Give, an adaptation of the wildly popular young-adult novel. Stenberg plays the book’s protagonist, a 16-year-old high school student named Starr Carter who witnesses the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by police, weighs whether to testify before a grand jury and becomes galvanized by the Black Lives Matter movement.
The movie’s themes chime with Stenberg ’s own willingness to take a stand, which she has demonstrated in her online persona and her career choices.
According to The Hate U Give author Angie Thomas, Stenberg embodies a generation impatient for change. “She doesn’t allow the world to box her in, nor does she let it silence her,” Thomas said. “She is not bending to Hollywood’s standards but rather setting her own, and for that not only will the film industry be better, but the world will indeed be better.”
If Stenberg attains the stardom many have predicted for her, it will be as a product of her generation at its most intersectional, media-literate and culturally competent. As an artist, activist and digital native, Stenberg is uniquely suited for a time when the public, the personal, the professional and the political have never been more fused.
Biracial in ethnic derivation, nonbinary in gender identification, gay in sexual orientation, multihyphenate in creative aspiration, Stenberg embodies a similar blurring of boundaries. She grew up in Los Angeles with her AfricanAmerican mother and Danish father, commuting from their modest Leimert Park neighbourhood to the far tonier Wildwood School. Her first movie role was in Colombiana, as a young version of Zoe Saldana. The Hunger Games — just her second film — was seen by tens of millions of people. But it was a video she made for history class in 2015 that became a watershed — called Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows, the short tutorial explained the most offensive dynamics of cultural appropriation. After Stenberg posted the video on Tumblr, it became a viral sensation.
Since then, Stenberg has been hailed as something of an avatar for a new, un-compartmentalized form of Hollywood activism. Whereas actors once adopted political causes almost like career accessories, in today’s 24-7 fishbowl, celebrities are expected to live their principles with every choice they make — on the red carpet and on Twitter, in their movies and publicity appearances, and in any unguarded moment within recording range of a cellphone.
Stenberg, who has more than two million followers between Twitter and Instagram, acknowledges she sometimes feels “overanalyzed,” adding “a lot of weight is ascribed to my actions, even when they’re not necessarily that deep to me.”
Thomas said she had Stenberg in mind while she was writing the book. “I came across her Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows video, and I was completely blown away,” she said. “Immediately, I thought, ‘That’s exactly who I want Starr to be.’ She embodied everything I hoped this character would become. She was outspoken, aware and passionate. She was the personification of ‘black girl magic.’”
As she has navigated young adulthood, a burgeoning career and the pressures of call-out culture, Stenberg has exerted commensurate care in nearly every choice she has made: Although she has three movies coming out this year (including the dystopian teen thriller The Darkest Minds and the Second World War-era drama Where Hands Touch), one reason she hasn’t made many until now, she said, is because the only roles available to her were “a black girl with a dirty mouth, or people who were oversexualized, or the little sister of a drug dealer — just dangerous tropes that I had no interest in portraying.”
If the near-constant scrutiny seems unfair to a teenager trying “to figure my s--- out,” Stenberg insisted it’s not a burden. “Because I have been vocal or critical of certain systems,” she said, “I think that puts me in a position where I’m more heavily critiqued, which I’m always down for if it’s in a way that’s constructive, because I’m definitely not perfect.” Plus, she added, “I don’t know if what I’m experiencing is necessarily unique to me ... I think everyone experiences it in some way, especially teenagers and younger people, because it’s just the world that we’re living in.”
A confession: Much as I love turning movie titles into acronyms — Dawn of the Planet of the Apes = DOT-POTA, and don’t even get me started on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow — I did not realize that the title The Hate U Give is the first half of rapper Tupac’s THUG LIFE (The Hate U Give Little Infants F---s Everyone).
So maybe The Hate U Give is not a movie directed at aging white critics. But if this one can be moved almost to tears by the story of a resilient black American
teenager facing a world of prejudice, sexism and violence, then clearly director George Tillman Jr. (Faster, Notorious) has crafted a story that will speak to anyone willing to listen.
The film features an Oscarworthy performance by 19-yearold Amandla Stenberg as Starr Carter, growing up in the fictional, mostly black neighbourhood of Garden Heights, and attending a mostly white school that might as well be on another planet.
Streetwise, but also just plain wise, Starr has learned how to compartmentalize the two sides of her life, even down to her vocabulary. For her classmates, she notes, “Slang makes them cool; slang makes me ’hood.”
She’s helped in her balancing act by her dad (Russell Hornsby), seen in the first scene giving Starr and her siblings The Talk. Nope, not that talk; he wants his kids to know their rights, but also to know how to react (or not) when confronted by police. Unfortunately, her childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith) doesn’t play by those rules, setting up a tragedy that them dominoes into a world of consequences for the young woman.
The Hate U Give is based on the young-adult novel by Angie Thomas and adapted by Audrey Wells, a filmmaker who died of cancer just before the movie opened.
It’s not a perfect film — Starr’s internal monologue gets a bit tiring, especially when the actor can express volumes with a twitch of her face.
And a few characters seem underwritten, not least Regina Hall as Starr’s mom. Plus the final scene feels too tidy given the harrowing two-plus hours we’ve just lived through.
But these are minor quibbles compared to the power of the narrative. Standouts in the cast include Common as Starr’s uncle, a black police officer who admits to racial profiling and K.J. Apa as her boyfriend, whose understanding of the racial divide between them straddles an endearing line between knowledge and naiveté, and provides a few perfect moments of comic relief, not least when he is mistaken for a chauffeur on prom night.
The mood of the film swings between despair and hope, as does the performance of its star. You wonder when she’s going to break, and what that will mean. I said Stenberg can say so much with a twitch.
But you can’t just twitch forever.