Writer-director Minhal Baig paints a poignant portrait of boyhood friendship amidst tragedy in 1990s Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
A coming-of-age drama set in the now demolished Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago in 1992, a setting many filmgoers associate with the “Candyman” horror films, “We Grown Now” could not be simpler or more affecting. Indie-film coming-of-age stories are a cliché. But cliches can be invigorated by a talented and big-hearted filmmaker with a story to tell. Chicago-born, Pakistani-American writer-director Minhal Baig is undoubtedly one of those. Baig’s previous effort, “Hala” (2019), was another coming-of-age effort enlivened by a breakout performance by Geraldine Viswanathan (“Drive-Away Dolls”). Arguably, “Hala” was closer to Baig’s wheelhouse since it tells the story of an adolescent Muslim-American skateboarder struggling with a pair of very strict and devout parents.
“We Grown Now” is the story of two young African-American boys growing up in Cabrini-Green at a time when drugs and gang shootings buffet the housing complex. We start with the “Goonies”-ready Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) dragging a prized mattress to a pile of mattresses in a playground, where Malik demonstrates his ability to jump, a gravity-defying metaphor for all the potential inside of him and his friends. Later, we see Malik and Eric in their Batcave-like hideout in the basement of their dingy building, where we also hear ghostly voices in the hallways and encounter a typically defunct elevator. The young actors bring these scenes to life.
Malik lives with his beautiful, unappreciated-at-work, bookkeeper mother, Dolores (Jurnee Smollett, “Lovecraft Country”), and his tireless seamstress grandmother, Anita (another powerful turn by S. Epatha Merkerson). With her eye on her sewing, Grandma tells semi-nostalgic tales of what is, in effect, the “old country.” That is Tupelo, Mississippi, a place from which she and her husband moved in the Great Migration to the North, seeking jobs and equal opportunity while fleeing such Jim Crow-type oppression as segregation, indentured servitude, convict leasing, and lynchings. “I do not miss that place,” she says. We will later learn that “Granddaddy’s shoe store was torched.”
Malik likes to tell jokes involving lame wordplay. The apartment he shares with his mother and grandmother has a leaking faucet in the bathroom and a bucket permanently beneath it. Eric lives with his widowed father, Jason (Lil Rel Howery), a stable, solid presence in his life, and his older sister Amber (Avery Holliday). Jason wears a pizza shop embroidered shirt (semi-proudly?) and insists that Eric pay attention when he counts out his hard-earned dollars to pay the family’s monthly bills,
At school, class begins with the Pledge of Allegiance with all its patriotic ironies. The teacher plays a video about the lives of dinosaurs. Malik and Eric sneak out of school, and after Malik asks an adult woman for a date, the boys arrive by train at the Art Institute of Chicago. They gaze at Walter W. Ellison’s 1935 painting “Train Station,” an Expressionistic rendering of a group of Black railway passengers complete with toilets labeled “Colored.” The score by Jay Wadley (“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”) conveys a lilting sense of wonder and possibility. Baig’s screenplay is full of symbols. Trains and stars represent ways out of Cabrini-Green. It is a bit ham-handed to have Malik and Eric shout, “I exist,” into the void. But it’s forgivable. Malik, his mother, and grandmother attend the funeral of a boy killed outside the school by a stray bullet. Mayor Daley sends the police to harass Cabrini-Green residents and traumatize their children in an effort to look tough. Dolores is offered a promotion and a much better-paying job three hours away. A sea change is coming, threatening a friendship.
“We Grown Now” gets to you. Among the film’s producers are Smollett and indie-film legend James Schamus, whose credits include “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), “The Ice Storm” (1997), and “Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994). Baig has transformed a humble story into something resonant and universal. Like its title, “We Grown Now” is both child-like and a farewell to childhood.
‘We Grown Now’
Rating: PG for mature themes
Cast: Blake Cameron James, Gian Knight Ramirez, Jurnee Smollett, S. Epatha Merkerson
Director: Minhal Baig
Writer: Minhal Baig
Running Time: 93 minutes
Where to Watch: AMC Boston Common, Landmark Kendall Square and suburban theaters
Grade: A-
Boston Movie News 