But that doesn’t mean it traffics in easy, finger-pointing answers.
#The hate you give movie movie
The title “The Hate U Give” comes from Tupac Shakur’s j’accuse aphorism “The Hate U Give Little Infants F-s Everybody” (i.e., THUG LIFE), and the movie is about tracing cycles of violence back to their racist American roots. Khalil is dead, and Starr, the only witness to what becomes a nationally reported crime, has never felt more like she’s in hiding. They’re stopped by a cop, and Khalil, furious at being singled out because he’s black, won’t stop giving the officer attitude when he reaches into the car for a hairbrush, the cop mistakes it for a gun and shoots. One night, she attends a party with her old hood friends, and after shots are fired she drives home with her childhood buddy Khalil (Algee Smith), who is now a drug dealer. She creates a white-friendly hip black version of herself, at once flaunting and concealing the person she is.
Apa), pride themselves, with a naïveté that’s at times comical, on how attuned they are to the nuances of African-American culture. Even that dynamic is fraught with irony, since Starr’s white friends, including her boyfriend, Chris (K.J. Shuttling back and forth between them has shaped her into a person with a dual image, almost a double agent: She’s still the girl she was growing up, but she’s also one who now feels as though she has to rein in her blackness at school.
The heroine, 16-year-old Starr Carter ( Amandla Stenberg), has grown up in the black Georgia neighborhood of Garden Heights but attends a mostly white and comparatively prosperous high school in an adjoining community.
The key to the film’s pull is that it’s a tale of injustice that’s really a drama of identity. Its central incident is the police shooting of a young black man, and at moments it suggests a high-school version of “Fruitvale Station,” except that “The Hate U Give” is mostly about the aftermath of the shooting, and if anything it cuts even deeper into the meaning of a crime like this one - the intersecting layers of why it happens and how it ripples outward. It’s also a stunningly acted movie that never panders or settles for middlebrow piety.
It’s that good, that searching, that fierce in its humanity. Yet “The Hate U Give,” as directed by George Tillman Jr., from a script by Audrey Wells (who died, after a battle with cancer, the day before the film was released), is the rare racial drama that will detonate the complacency of even those who are drawn to see it. The film is based on a young-adult novel by Angie Thomas, and excuse my prejudice if I confess that I don’t tend to go to YA movies to have my mind opened up about America’s racial complexities. Yet one of the shockingly powerful things about “ The Hate U Give,” a drama of racial discord that’s been playing to enthralled audiences and finally went wide this weekend, is that it unfolds in a moral zone that keeps forcing you to question what you think. And a pivotal way this degrades our discourse is that neither side feels like it has the luxury to look for shades of gray. It’s dispiriting, if more true than not, to keep hearing that the two sides of America have no more overlap, that we’re at fundamental odds, plugged into different news streams, different cultural-ideological values, different realities.
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