WE GROWN NOW - Mark Reviews Movies

We Grown Now, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 18, 2024

In Chicago, the public housing of Cabrini-Green became synonymous with poverty and crime, and although all of the high-rise apartment buildings of the housing project have been gone for more than a decade now, the memory of that association remains. Writer/director Minhal Baig's We Grown Now doesn't attempt to reform the legacy of the housing project, which was a systematic failure of the city's government ignoring and actively neglecting the needs of the people, mostly Black citizens, who lived there. It does, however, shine a light on examples of those who surely must have the overwhelming majority of the project's residents.

The characters here are ordinary people, simply trying to make a living, put food on the table, pay the bills, and, with their homes dismissed as a kind of urban hellscape by the powers-that-be that could have done something about it, dream of a life beyond these concrete towers. Baig's screenplay makes this point a little too bluntly in the film, despite the story's simple and compassionate slice-of-life aims and outlook. Even with those qualms, though, the film's narrative still feels authentic and tunnels through a scandalous piece of local history to find the humanity that has been buried underneath it.

In a way, the film's on-the-nose approach to its themes and ideas almost works in its favor, if only because of the characters who are the heart of the story, set in 1992. They're two young boys, Mailk (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), who have been best friends for as long as either can remember, since their families live a floor apart in one of the high-rise apartment buildings. Like any kids, the two try to have fun any way they can, such as how the opening scene follows them "junking" through an empty apartment, dragging a mattress down hallways and stairs and the long stretch of pavement, and joining other children leaping as high as they can and landing on a pile of bedding.

They have each other, and each boy also has his family. Malik lives with his mother Dolores (Jurnee Smollett), grandmother Anita (S. Epatha Merkerson), and sister. Dolores works at a company in the pay department, and being constantly faced with how everyone in the office earns more than her, even though she's putting in longer hours to cover expenses, is starting to take its toll. Anita remembers a time when it wasn't like this in Cabrini-Green, after she and her late husband, who died five years ago, moved to Chicago from Mississippi. Jobs were more readily available, and families used to spend time together out on the community porches of each high-rise level.

Meanwhile, Eric lives with his father Jason (Lil Rel Howery), who works at a pizza place and demands that his children excel at school, and older sister Amber (Avery Holliday), who will soon be the first member of the family to attend college. Eric's mother died recently, and the still-grieving kid has become cynical and doubtful well-beyond his years as a result.

There's good reason for that, too, apart from such a devastating loss. The boys live here, after all, and the death of a boy their age or thereabouts, killed by stray gunfire while walking with his mother, puts the entire neighborhood on police-mandated lockdown. Nothing like that is depicted in the film, and indeed, Baig takes it a step further.

Outside of the current safety of their apartments, Malik and Eric only see other children, if anyone at all after the police order, because that—not gangs or drugs or violence—is the sole focus of their lives, while ID checks and random police searches are the only thing disrupting the domestic routine of their lives. The notion of a boy they knew dying is so outside their comprehension that it's only until the funeral that Malik really starts thinking in specific terms of one day living somewhere other than this place.

Those thoughts are portrayed both as fantasy and in more tangible ways. Lying on mattresses in that abandoned apartment, the boys can sometimes imagine seeing through the cracks of the concrete ceiling and becoming surrounded by stars, and Malik begins seeing the movement of light and shadow from the windows of his bedroom as akin to watching the landscape pass on a train. More practically, the kids play hooky from school one day, after being stuck in the routine of only traveling to and from school during the lockdown, and head downtown. There, they're free to ride trains and buses, watch people go about their everyday lives, and visit an art museum, where a painting of the racially segregated South and the Great Migration North gets Malik thinking about moving more than before.

Baig tells this story with such visual clarity and narrative simplicity that the gradual increase in characters explaining these notions does become a bit distracting (It's especially jarring from the kids, who talk about religious skepticism with the same ease as they do which Chicago basketball player of the moment is the best). The strength of the film is in its everyday, observational style, bolstered by the naturalistic performances (James and Ramirez are wholly believable, and Smollett brings a palpable, wearied determination to her character). The laying bare of the story's thematic intentions, then, is redundant.

Even so, We Grown Now does possess that inherent potency of its storytelling and filmmaking. Like its young protagonists calling out that they matter to anyone who will or refuses to hear, the film shows us that the people of Cabrini-Green did matter and, at the time, should have mattered more than the neighborhood's reputation.

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