A film that offers a brave look at a highly charged sociopolitical issue: The Hate U Give

George Tillman Jr.'s The Hate U Give (2018) deserves much praise and credit for taking on the vital issue of police brutality and racism in a serious manner that largely avoids melodrama and sensationalism. This film, based on the novel by Angie Thomas, focuses on a 16-year-old black girl, Starr (played very well by Amandla Stenberg), who witnesses the the death of a black friend, shot by a white police officer in what should have been a routine traffic stop. Among the strengths of the film: none of the (major) characters is all good or all bad, we get a good sense of various views of the shooting death, including an important conversation Starr has w/ her uncle, a black police officer; we see how the reports of the shooting bring out all kinds of tensions and animosities in the black community; we see Starr's character grow in bravery and independence over the course of the film; and we get nuanced but largely affirmative portrayal of the a black community in crisis and confrontation. One the drawback side, however, it seems to me that the filmmakers had little sense of Starr's back story as one of the few students of color in an elite private school. For the first 20 minutes or so, establishing Starr's relationships w/ her schoolmates and her (white) boyfriend, I thought I was watching a black version of Clueless - with way too much voice-over and no credible character except for Starr herself. I also think the one of the plot strands - the drug gang's anger at Starr for her grand jury testimony - was a bit of a stretch: Would the gang really care that she named them as a source of drugs in her community? Isn't that something everyone would know? Why pick a fight over that? That said, some parts of the film were really strong, notably the filming of the Black Lives Matter protest march turned violent and a powerful scene on campus in which Starr demonstrates to a so-called friend what it feels like for a black person to be threatened by a cop. And really I don't quite buy the ending. Still, it's a film that easily could have been maudlin and didactic but turns out to be dramatic and frighteningly informative - a brave look at a highly charged sociopolitical issue.