‘We Grown Now’ review: Amid gritty Chicago reality, two friends embrace childhood

( PG ) ( Monitor Movie Guide )
|
Courtesy of Participant & Sony Pictures Classics
In the new film “We Grown Now,” Jurnee Smollett stars as the mother of a 12-year-old boy living in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992.

Years ago I reviewed a movie set in a gang-ridden Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. I wrote that its portrayal of a young girl, whose innocence was undimmed by all the violence, seemed unbelievable.

Not long after the review ran, I was invited to be a guest on a popular radio show with a Black host. After the usual introductory pleasantries, he laced into me for assuming that, amid the brutality, the girl’s purity of feeling was an impossibility.

He was right.

Why We Wrote This

A story focused on

For the Monitor’s reviewer, the young boys in “We Grown Now” exude something that is often difficult to find believable amid tough surroundings: innocence. The new film, he says, honors “just being a kid.”

I was reminded of this incident while watching “We Grown Now,” an affecting low-budget feature written and directed by Minhal Baig, whose previous film, “Hala,” drew on her coming-of-age as a first-generation Pakistani American in Chicago. “We Grown Now” is likewise set in Chicago, in 1992, and centers on the friendship between two 12-year-old boys who both live in the notoriously dangerous and run-down Cabrini-Green housing project.

The home lives of these best buddies are markedly different. Malik (Blake Cameron James), with his younger sister, lives with his watchful single mother (Jurnee Smollett) and doting grandmother (S. Epatha Merkerson). Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) lives with his single father (Lil Rel Howery), of whom we don’t see much.

Despite the ever-present hazards of their surroundings, culminating in the shooting death of a 7-year-old boy from the projects, Malik and Eric exude an almost transcendent guilelessness. They are self-aware enough to know that, despite everything, this is a precious time in their lives – a time when they can exult in just being a kid.

Courtesy of Participant & Sony Pictures Classics
Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) explore worlds real and imagined in "We Grown Now."

“Flying” is what they call their favorite pastime. They haul mattresses from abandoned apartments onto the local playground and then, after a running start, alight on them with a thud after jumping high in the air. Baig films these interludes in slow motion, so that we, too, can capture the exhilaration.  

The film is almost entirely shot from the perspective of Malik and Eric, and yet Baig also makes us pointedly aware of the world outside the boys’ bubble. Particularly in the scenes in Cabrini-Green, she fills the soundtrack with a cacophony of neighborhood noise, which functions almost like a major character in the film. It echoes the interconnectedness of all who live in this blighted landscape.

First-time actors James and Ramirez are naturals, giving maybe the best kid performances I’ve seen since “The Florida Project.” The adults in the film, particularly Eric’s dad, are sometimes too sketchily filled in, but the acting mostly makes up for the lack. There’s a wonderful moment when Merkerson, as the grandmother, reminisces about her young life in Tupelo, Mississippi – she misses the people, not the place. She says at one point that “there’s poetry in everything.”

Perhaps it is she who inspires Malik’s imagination. In one scene, he and Eric lie on their backs looking up at a cracked apartment ceiling and fancy they are peering at constellations. When they play hooky from school and duck into the Art Institute of Chicago, they gape in rapid-fire wonderment at the canvases. Through the fenced-in grating in Cabrini-Green, they exult in unison, “We exist!”

We feel as protective of these boys as does Malik’s mother, wonderfully played by Smollett. Aghast at their truancy from school, she cries out, “How am I supposed to keep you safe?” Her wail undercuts the boys’ spiritedness and keeps the film from devolving into a homespun childhood idyll. She is aware, even if the boys are not, that the world out there is a minefield.

Her decision to leave her low-paying office job for a better one in a safer place, in far off Peoria, will pry the boys apart. Malik and Eric are still too unformed to fully comprehend what this separation will mean to their lives. They turn on each other because they don’t really know how to say goodbye. The power of this film sneaks up on you. It glides from jubilation to heartbreak without missing a beat.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “We Grown Now,” which rolls out in theaters starting April 19, is rated PG for thematic material and language. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to ‘We Grown Now’ review: Amid gritty Chicago reality, two friends embrace childhood
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2024/0418/we-grown-now-minhal-baig-movie-review
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe