Rebel with a cause: fall in love with
IN A dystopia, far, far away… Teencentric movies often encourage audiences to fight the power but at one remove. In fact, this film’s lead actress, Amandla Stenberg, had a part in The Hunger Games (she was brave, doomed little Rue from District 11). Stenberg was perfect in that Young Adult classic and she’s pretty good in this, which is based on Angie
Thomas’s 2017 bestseller about a black teenager, Starr Carter, politicised after witnessing a police shooting.
Starr (Stenberg) has an ex-con, Black Panther dad (Russell Hornsby) and a caring, aspirational mum (Regina Hall). She’s an expert at codeswitching, ie, changing her behaviour depending on whether she is in a black environment or a white one. The Carters live in the hood but send their kids to the virtually all-white, upper-middle-class Williamson Prep. When Starr walks through the school, the gleaming corridors appear oppressive. Director George Tillman Jr says he used lenses left over from Ben-Hur to shoot these scenes. We get it: if Starr doesn’t watch out, she’ll be eaten alive.
The dialogue is fast, funny and distressing. The plot hinges on the shooting by a cop of an unarmed black boy, Khalil (Algee Smith; even more deft than he was in Detroit).