THE FILM version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2016 stage musical Hamilton — a tribute to American founding father Alexander Hamilton — is an exquisite adaptation from stage to screen.

Performed mainly by black actors, it’s particularly effective in counterposing individual performers in close-up at key moments as they commit to rebellion against the British during the American revolution of 1775-1783 with shots of the ensemble’s frenetic energy during song-and-dance numbers — a mix of rap, hip-hop and R&B — as the young country struggles to be born and to exist.  

The hip-hop music is at times somewhat flattened out as it accommodates the Broadway musical idiom. Yet the lyrical mastery of the perpetual rapping opens up the possibilities of not only what but also how much can be said, providing a dense layer of non-stop rhyming and energy that reinvigorates a staid musical tradition.

The first half is propelled by the seditious struggle of the colonists but the second half takes on the task of dramatising Hamilton’s nationalising the financial system through the Federal Reserve and the battle over states’ rights, more complex and difficult subjects to dramatise on stage.

Miranda not only wrote the musical, he also takes the role of perpetual outsider Hamilton and lends a quiet dignity to the character in the last act, which focuses on his redemption and demise and Daveed Diggs, a showstopper who keeps the second half humming, is pulse-poundingly charismatic as Thomas Jefferson.

But despite its artistic merits, there’s a problem with the show. In light of the current Black Lives Matter protests it seems trapped in 2016, a relic of Obama-era representation where the best African-Americans could hope for was, as the black actor playing Aaron Burr sings, simply to be present in “the room where it happens.”

But those somewhat empty words do not imply having any power. They unfortunately point to the vacuousness of Obama-era “change” which, in the end, resulted just four years later in African-Americans having to take to the streets en masse to demand that they not be shot by the police.

This is not the main problem, though. The show has African-American actors in the roles of what largely at the time were their white masters, particularly George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, key characters in the production.

The prolific and erudite African-American historian Gerald Horne in his book The Counter-Revolution of 1776 claims that one of the major reasons for the “revolution” that Hamilton is so keen to lionise is so that white slaveholders in the colonies could keep hold of their slaves.

He illustrates how the British and the Crown, mocked in the musical as cowardly and patronising, had, four years before the rebellion and as a way of controlling the colonies, acted to free the slaves in the Americas.

Horne’s contention that this attempt by the northern transporters and southern owners of slaves to preserve the institution was perhaps the root cause of the American revolution can be debated.

But what the book proves beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the uprising and victory by the settler colonialists, as viewed from the perspective of both African slaves and the indigenous Native or First Americans — both of whom, when possible, fought on the side of the British —  perpetuated over 350 years of oppression and inequality for both groups that are still with us today.

The main line of the musical is a constant validation of an American project which systematically at its outset and beyond disenfranchised the very African-Americans who so cheerfully and energetically lend their voices to revalidating these founding fathers.

Thus Washington’s melancholy lament in the number One Last Time as he prepares to retire to Mount Vernon, omits the fact that his luxurious retirement on the plantation is financed by the work of his slaves.

The falsehood of the settler colonial rationale whereby all men are created equal — and it was promulgated by Jefferson, who held over 300 slaves — was, Horne asserts, never sufficiently challenged and has consequently repeated itself throughout American history.

The US has thwarted indigenous movements toward independence and autonomy in Korea, Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, in Indonesia and Vietnam in the 1960s, in Chile and Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s and today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Venezuela, while fostering death and destruction in Libya and Syria.

Hamilton’s attempt to put one more patch over the myth of American exceptionalism, which sees the country only as a pillar and shining light of freedom, is fraying at the edges because of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Hamilton already appears locked in a time capsule, emblematic of an era where simple representation without real change was all that was on offer.

It’s not enough to just be present in “the room where it happens.” As the black US playwright August Wilson said, it’s not enough to be simply a witness to African-American representation and a white culture whose thrust is “to deny us our own humanity, our own history and our own need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans.”  

Hamilton is available for download on Disney+.