Directed by George Tillman Jr, this lively adaptation of Angie Thomas’s bestselling 2017 YA novel is about an African American teenager named Starr (an endlessly watchable Amandla Stenberg), who is the sole witness when her unarmed childhood friend is shot and killed by the police. “Being black is an honour. Know your rights. Know your worth,” says Starr’s father, Maverick (Russell Hornsby), reading a quotation from the Black Panther manifesto to his three children while explaining the protocol for when the police inevitably pull them over.
A lesser film might feel worthy, but Thomas’s novel is given the full Hollywood treatment. Though it leans on the genre beats of melodrama to occasionally clunky effect in order to mine the audience’s tears, it’s impressive how it metabolises these moments of charged emotion in order to make its wider points. For a mainstream movie, its confidence in its own politics is astonishingly clear-eyed, articulately outlining complicated social problems from interracial relationships (“If you don’t see my blackness, you don’t see me”) and code-switching (“Slang makes them look cool; it makes me look hood”) to white privilege and performative protesting.
