“The Hate U Give” realistically captured the tension and discrimination between law enforcement and the black community. It also included the experience of a black teenager being around predominantly whites and the experience of being in a neighborhood ran by drug lords.

For the most part, director George Tillman Jr. and screenplay writer Audrey Wells did a good job of following the book it was based on by Angie Thomas. 

Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) is a 16-year-old black girl who lives in a black neighborhood, but attends a prep school where she is surrounded by well-off white kids. Starr, similar to quite a few black people, feels that she needs two personalities. When she is at Williamson prep she cannot be too loud, use slang, or not look unapproachable in order to avoid the typical ghetto black girl stereotypes. Then when she is with her friends from home in Garden Heights, she is able to factor in the traits she avoids at school but still does not fully fit in there either. 

One night she decides to step out and attend a party in Garden Heights. This is when she runs into her childhood friend Kahlil (Algee Smith). When the party starts to take a turn, Kahlil offers to take Starr home which leads to her seeing him get shot and killed by a white police officer. The movie and book follow Carter and the city’s reaction to an unarmed black boy being killed by an officer who confused a hairbrush with a gun, and the fight to get justice for Khalil. Just like when incidents like this really happen the city went into protest mode. Immediately following Kahlil’s funeral there was a march that was supposed to be peaceful but later on turned into a riot. 

The movie also shows the reaction from those who try to justify the killing, including cops, members of the media, and a friend of Starr’s from Williamson Prep. 

Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter), Starr’s friend, drops subtle racist comments throughout the movie which pull their friendship apart, but the main point was when she fed into the horrible stereotype and assumption about every black man that “he was probably going to die anyway”. This leads into a very symbolic scene of Starr holding a hairbrush over Hailey and yelling as if she were a cop. 

Each scene leading to and including the climatic moment had the audience intrigued and full of emotions and tears. The movie was an overall amazing and realistic depiction of the whole story.