The Hate U Give is a story about a girl named Starr who is switching between two lives one in the poor, mostly black, the neighborhood where she lives, and the rich mostly white prep school where she attends.

The balance between the two worlds is broken when she witnesses a shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil by the hands of a police officer and she is pressured from different sides of her community to stand up for what she believes is right.

This is a movie where it demonstrates the views from the side where it shows the hard truth of how society is facing police brutality and how sometimes the world can be unfair.

In this situation, the police officer doesn’t get charged with murder and the officer ended up winning the case.

The movie helps humanize the young characters beyond what we often read in news stories. Amandla Stenberg, who plays Staar, shows what it is like to be divided between two worlds: the prep school where she goes to school and her original neighborhood where her friends and family experience police harassment on a regular basis.

I give this movie a good 4 out of 5. It’s interesting and makes you want to know what the characters are going to do next.  The director does a good job of showing how these types of events actually affect people’s lives. It’s refreshing to see a movie with young people dealing with serious issues instead of cliché teenage drama.