Between the World and Me

All of it combines to bring Coates’s words up off the page with startlingly precise intent. Old news footage transitions to recent outrages; dreams are shattered and reassembled to reflect unflinching truths. There’s as much to look at as there is to hear; the words and images meld almost seamlessly.

Between The World And Me is not some hopeful, optimistic assessment of what’s to become of this country or the Black people who built it. Instead, Coates, through Forbes’ lens, offers the truth.

Haunting and poetic.

The HBO version is a gorgeously sorrowful prose poem about being Black in America, then and now. It hits you in your head but mostly your heart, as it blends together emotional readings from Coates’s book, archival clips of the Black experience in America, a searching soundtrack that breaks into hip-hop songs, sequences of animation and watercolors, and other ambient devices. It’s not a documentary, or a staged recitation, or a music video; it’s all of them and more.

The TV adaptation is a worthy screen translation of Coates’ monumental work, with archival footage, original animation and hip-hop tracks lending historical and emotional texture to the author’s words.

The film brings the book to its own visual life, and does so in a creative, engaging style, speaking to the country’s schizophrenia, and tells the truth about America, because history is often told from records left by the privileged.

There’s something lost in this translation between page and screen that depends upon this many performers; their interpretations are still powerful, but immediately more scattered, and it’s hard not to wonder if a more pared down version might have been even more effective. And yet it’s even harder to imagine which speakers should get cut, as nearly all convincingly ground themselves in the material.

Sometimes the material is too busy for its own good, with the supplemental images fighting for dominance when the words are more than enough to carry the feeling. But when it fires on all cylinders, this is a very effective, powerful companion piece to its source.

Between the World and Me doesn’t necessarily offer the most incisive social commentary, but as a document of our contemporary political moment, its force is undeniable.