Meshaun Labrone Arnold both wrote and starred in The Hate U Gave, but the piece had little of the self-indulgent flab most writer/actors can't bring themselves to shear from their own work. His acting and writing were wise, while his subject — and character — was just a savant: a man who saw the whole world clearly except for his own place in it. Watching Arnold, as Tupac, rage against the chasms that divide us (by gender, class, or anything else, but especially by race) — even as he bore helpless witness to his own inability to do anything but widen them — was to see right into the hidden heart of alienation. Arnold's tense, kinetic body and tortured face were pictographs, notating its cost.