As she realizes that the media are more interested in whether Khalil was a drug dealer than whether there was any justification for his murder, she is moved to speak out. She tells nobody at school, not even her unbelievably supportive White boyfriend, played rather woodenly by KJ Apa. At first, she tries to stay anonymous and avoid public interviews. In a superb acting job, Amandla Stenberg plays Starr, Khalil’s friend from childhood who witnesses the shooting and is forced to decide how far to stick her neck out to get justice. As one character in the film puts it, the weapon the cop feared was not what he thought Khalil was holding it was his Blackness. The teen, Khalil (Algee Smith), picks up an innocuous object - in this case, a hairbrush.
A White policeman pulls a Black male teenager over for a traffic stop. In this case, the incident that moves Starr Carter from a double life - hip in her Black neighborhood, quiet and restrained in her elite school - is one that we’ve heard about more times than we can count. The title comes from Tupak Shakur’s album “Thug Life,” which stood for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody,” referring, of course, to the effect of racism on our society. What does it take to make a Black teenager who has been trying to make nice in her nearly all White private school realize that sometimes there is no middle ground - that she has to take action? That’s the essential plot in “The Hate U Give.” The film is based on the young adult novel of the same name by Mississippi-born writer Angie Thomas.