The Hate U Give is a powerful movie that demands to be seen

Based on a popular book, this new release demands to be seen, with its essential story and incredible performance from its young star.

Tattooed across Tupac Shakur’s lower abs were the words THUG LIFE.

It wasn’t some smug declaration of how tough he thought he was. It was an acronym that stood for “The Hate U Give Little Infants F**ks Everybody”.

Through his music, Tupac captured an aspect of the African-American experience — what outsiders saw as merely violence, drugs and poverty, he eloquently rapped about the structures and prejudice that create those conditions and how it traps people across generations.

With THUG LIFE, Tupac’s message was clear — how you treat our people as kids is what comes back to bite you on the butt. It’s about centuries of discrimination and racism internalised by children who grow up believing they’re worth less than.

It’s a powerful but simple message that author Angie Thomas paints in her young adult novel The Hate U Give, now adapted into a feature film starring Amandla Stenberg, Regina Hall, Common, KJ Apa and Anthony Mackie, and directed by George Tillman Jr.

Stenberg plays 16-year-old Starr Carter, an African-American teenager who lives in a predominantly black neighbourhood but goes to a nearby private school populated by mostly privileged white kids.

She tells us in voiceover of the two versions of Starr she presents to the world — the one at home and the one at school. Like her pop culture idol, Will Smith’s Fresh Prince, she straddles two worlds and reconciling them isn’t easy.

Starr 2.0, the school one, is polite, non-confrontational and never uses “black slang”, even if her white friends do — she doesn’t want to give anyone a reason to call her “ghetto”.

On her way home from a party, Starr becomes the sole witness to the fatal shooting of her friend Khalil (Algee Smith), an unarmed black teenage boy, by a white police officer during a traffic stop.

The Hate U Give demands to know how comfortable everyone can be about the young black lives lost.

It’s a traumatising event, not just for Starr and her family, but for a community who’s seen this happen far too often, the names of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland still ringing loudly.

You can add to that list Stephon Clark, whose family today has filed a lawsuit against the Sacramento Police department after two white officers killed the 22-year-old, shot in the back as he stood in his own backyard, holding a mobile phone.

The Hate U Give wants America and the world to grapple with this all too common scenario, and of the fallout every time.

It wants America to ask itself why it’s so preoccupied with why the narrative of these victims becomes about their potential gang affiliations when, in the movie’s case, Khalil was killed while being pulled over for a traffic violation.

Or why Black Lives Matter protesters are demonised for expressing their grief and their anger about the glacial pace of change.

Justice isn’t given, it’s taken and smiling politely with your hands in your lap will only get you so far before the status quo decides they’ve reached their limit.

Amandla Stenberg gives an incredible performance.

What The Hate U Give does, and which the Oscar hopeful and higher-profiled Green Book failed to do, is probe the pervasive scourge of institutional racism, as embodied in Tupac’s THUG LIFE.

The Hate U Give is a smart, thoughtful and emotionally resonant movie that not only tells a compelling story, it also seeks to grapple with points considered “too hard” by most — it’s a movie that demands to be seen.

Centring this story on a clever teenage girl, one who’s uncertain of her identity and place, is a way to humanise the issue. And that’s in large part thanks to a strong and incredibly moving performance from Stenberg, who never holds anything back from the audience and never overplays a moment.

She’s a star in the making.

The movie opens on a scene of young Starr, then nine years old, as she and her brother are sitting down with their father who’s teaching his small kids how to interact with the police so they can walk away with their lives at the end of it.

“Keep your hands where they can see them” is the overriding message. No child should have to have that scared into them.

Rating: ★★★½

The Hate U Give is in cinemas from Thursday, January 31.

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