More than a teen movie: a timely take on America’s racial divide
The Hate U Give 12A cert, 133 min
Dir George Tillman Jnr Starring Amandla Stenberg, Russell Hornsby, Algee Smith, Anthony Mackie, Regina Hall, KJ Apa
If now isn’t the time for a teen-focused drama dealing with America’s racial divisions, it’s hard – or, in fact, rather terrifying – to imagine when that might be. The Hate U Give, based on Angie Thomas’s novel, is a long way from the moony, idealised confections that the young adult genre tends to throw our way. It enfolds a provocative story about police brutality into the first-person reality of Starr (Amandla Stenberg), a young black student caught between two worlds in the fictitious neighbourhood of Garden Heights.
Her parents (Russell Hornsby and Regina Hall) have long escaped the ghetto into comfortable affluence, and sent her to a private school, where she humours the effortful homie posturing of her white peers in a careful bid to seem non-threatening in their midst. On the other side of the tracks, she’s just as much of a fish out of water, routinely mocked for her white friends and middle-class aspirations.
The nuance of her predicament is finely caught by the film’s late screenwriter, Audrey Wells. The family portrait really shines, especially Starr’s relationship with her father (the terrific Hornsby), a reformed drug dealer who has instilled in his children a pragmatic attitude to authority: hands on the dashboard when the police approach, but as a covert system of survival, built on proud foundations of self-respect.
It’s a lesson that winds up saving Starr’s life. Taken home after a dodgy party by her childhood sweetheart Khalil (Algee Smith), she becomes the only witness to his shooting by a rookie cop, who mistakes a hairbrush for a firearm, and an innocent black boy for a potential killer. It’s the ramifications of this moment that yank Starr from her hiding place, culturally speaking, and open her eyes to who her true friends and enemies are.
Updating the inner-city tragedy of John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood for a new generation, and crucially repurposing it through a younger, female lens, George Tillman Jnr’s film isn’t without its flat-out didactic moments. While the white characters’ appropriation of #Blacklivesmatter as a borderline feelgood slogan feels cringily accurate, a few of the minor characters scan as rhetorical placeholders more than people.
For the thoughtful balancing act it manages as drama, though, this deserves serious appreciation as much more than the obvious message movie it might have been. It surges up to lasting emotional peaks thanks to Stenberg, a gifted graduate of other teen angst pictures, whose magnetic, remarkably intuitive screen presence is this film’s life and soul. She wins you over to its side within seconds, and has no intention of letting you go.