If they’re confronted by a cop, they must respectfully comply, keeping their hands in sight at all times-though Maverick presents this tactic as a matter of pride and survival, not of subservience. Starr knows just what to do: She and her siblings have been schooled by their father, Maverick (Russell Hornsby), a guy who has turned his life around after serving a prison sentence.
And then, as Kahlil is driving Starr home from a house party-he whisks her away after a fight breaks out-he’s stopped by a belligerent white cop. It’s clear the two have mutual crushes on one another, but Starr is true to her boyfriend. The action shifts when Starr reunites with an old friend from the neighborhood, Kahlil (Algee Smith), whom she hasn’t seen for a while. But The Hate U Give goes far beyond that basic premise, beginning as one movie and ending up another-that’s not a liability, but a plus. Even Starr’s boyfriend Chris does it, though at least he’s self-aware enough to make a joke out of it. The Hate U Give starts out as a culture-clash story, maybe even a romantic comedy, about a young black woman navigating a world where white kids-most of them with money-think nothing of rattling off black slang just because they think it’s cool. You could make a whole movie, probably a pretty good one, riffing on that one complication.
But at home, she’s just Starr, at ease with her neighborhood friends in a way she can’t be with her school friends. Apa), who, despite being occasionally clueless, is still a genuinely smart, sensitive kid. She even has a white boyfriend, Chris (K.J. Starr traverses these two worlds with relative ease: At school, she fits in perfectly with the white kids, becoming a version of herself she calls Starr Version 2. The local public high school, she explains in an early voiceover, “is where you go to get jumped, high or pregnant.” Her mother, Lisa (Regina Hall), wants to keep Starr and her two younger siblings far away from all that. The Hate U Give pours that idea into the shape of an engaging story, with a charismatic young performer at its center: Amandla Stenberg plays Starr Carter, a young woman of color who goes to a fancy, nearly all-white private school far from the neighborhood in which she lives, Garden Heights.
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