Starr witnesses the whole thing and finds herself at a crossroads. The catalyst for change comes when her friend Khalil (Algee Smith) is fatally shot by a white police officer (Drew Starkey) who mistakes Khalil’s hairbrush for a gun.
Stenberg nails every nuance of a role that keeps throwing challenges at her, none more devastating than when it becomes impossible for Starr to remain stuck in neutral. It is impossible to over-praise Stenberg’s incandescent performance, a gathering storm that grows in ferocity and feeling with each scene. The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here) The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio System Apa of Riverdale), a secret from her family and her family away from him, scrupulously code-switching by playing it straight down the middle while her white classmates talk “black” to sound cool. She keeps her white boyfriend, Chris ( K.J. But Starr instinctively knows she’s living a lie. Starr’s mother (the reliably stellar Regina King) thinks of the school as a way out for her children. And that’s the test facing Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), a 16-year-old African-American girl who finds it easier to ignore the race crimes transpiring in her low-income neighborhood by attending a private, mostly white prep school across town.
It’s one thing to say Black Lives Matter, it’s another to live it. ( Soul Food, Notorious) takes to the 2017 young-adult bestseller by Angie Thomas cuts through the noise of headlines and sermonizing. The Hate U Give looks to be the exception to that rule, largely because the blunt force approach that director George Tillman Jr. Harsh reality is already too much for most audiences. Yet the moral outrage expressed so potently in such films as Fruitvale Station and Monsters and Men rarely results in impactful box office. Police shootings of unarmed black men are such a tragic part of everyday life that it’s no wonder movies feel the need to offer their take on the subject.