Stage director and producer Kamilah Forbes, who adapted Between the World and Me for the Apollo Theatre in 2018, returns to take the reins as director for this confrontational, impressionistic perspective of Black America.

Through this grim reality, Between the World and Me also features captivating depictions of Black life, from its radical collage title sequence to the delicate montages of families and inner-city murals.

During Barack Obama’s two-term presidency, Coates was disgruntled with Obama’s contradiction between providing solace to white people through his political rhetoric, while numerous cases of police brutality against Black people went viral.

Coates was driven to warn his young son, Samori, about the social implications of being a Black person in America: “This is your country, this is your world and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”.

Like the film’s score, the cast of Between the World and Me is multi-generational, retelling the disparities between Black and white communities.

Amid this vision of whitewashed life, Black Americans have always been on the opposing end, as explained by Grown-ish darling Yara Shahidi and political activist Angela Y.

Perhaps the redundancy of these lessons was a subtle attempt to make white students feel at ease, without being exposed to the radicalism of the Black Panther Party, or the 1973 blaxploitation film The Spook Who Sat By the Door.

The white woman who dehumanized Samori also threatened Coates with “I could have you arrested” — an all-too-common pompous threat used to keep Black people from getting out of line.

The film provides viewers with a much-needed dose of the reality Black Americans have endured since we were involuntarily brought here in the 1600s.

As Between the World and Me tells it, Black Americans are still enduring that struggle, but they have the strength to outlive it