A performance such as 19-year-old Amandla Stenberg gives in “The Hate U Give” is one that I haven’t seen since I saw Charlize Theron in her Oscar-winning role in “Monster”. Sadly, because of who she is, she probably won’t get any Oscar recognition for her performance.

Stenberg plays Starr Carter, a Black girl who in the evenings and weekends spends time in the ghetto living with her parents, brother and half-brother while during the week goes to a private, white, elite school where she feels she is ‘Starr 2” to avoid being stereotyped.

One night she is at a party and a friend, a boy, Khalil, played by Algee Smith, she has known since childhood offers to drive her home. Within 10 minutes Khalil, a black boy, who fails to signal when switching lanes is pulled over by a white policeman and when he reaches for a hairbrush is shot. Starr, handcuffed, watches her friend bleed out and die.

Many people have heard about ‘the talk’ black parents have to have with their children, they have seen television newscasts and read accounts of many black kids being shot by while police with the former dying and the latter not paying any price for what they have done.

This is a film that shows what the talk is about, what black kids and families go through and have to face. It takes us behind the newscasts we see and hear. Audrey Wells wrote the screenplay based on the book by Angie Thomas takes us into the mind of a young black girl, Starr, and allows us to see exactly how she is affected by not only those around her but by life.

We meet her father Maverick (Russell Hornsby) an ex-convict, who has opened his own store and early in the film gives the ‘talk, to his 3 kids explaining what to do not if but when they are stopped by the police. His wife Lisa (Regina Hall) loves her husband and sees him through the bad times in his life and is now they embarrass their children by expressing their love to each other.

Maverick’s brother, Carlos (Common) is a policeman and in talks with his niece Starr explains what a policeman goes through when he stops a black person as well as a white person. We live what Starr goes through when threatened by a drug dealer named King (Anthony Mackie) because her telling the grand jury convened regarding whether to charge the policeman who killed her friend can get him into trouble and when an activist and lawyer, played by Issa Rae, guides her through that grand jury happenings and Starr’s conflict about whether to tell the truth or keep silent.

This and much more, such as Starr having a white boyfriend, gets us inside her head about all that she is involved in and around her. Amanda Stenberg’s Starr lets us into the mind of a black teenager while the screenplay and the director, George Tillman, Jr., takes us behind the headlines, the lead stories and shows us what really happens.

“The Hate U Give” is a must-see for many reasons including a performance by Amanda Stenberg that will be for her to beat and a movie that shows us that think we know it all know very little about other people.

Movie trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXy0H-EZR5s