WE GROWN NOW: 4 STARS. “a stylized, haunting portrait of childhood.”
A study in friendship, family and community, “We Grown Now,” a new drama now playing in theatres, combines reality and fantasy, hope and joy, to create a moving coming-of-age story that gently tugs at the heartstrings.
Set in 1992, against a backdrop of gang warfare in Chicago’s violent Cabrini-Green Homes housing project, “We Grown Now” tells the story of tweens Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), best friends who grew up in Cabrini-Green. Malik lives with his mother Dolores (Jurnee Smollett) and grandmother Anita (S. Epatha Merkerson), while Eric lives with his dad (Lil Rel Howery) across the way.
“Me and Eric have done everything together since we were born,” says Malik. “We grew up together. Our place is the people. This is where we’re from.”
They’re good kids who do the things kids do. They tell bad jokes—“How do you make a tissue dance? You put a little ‘boogie’ into it.”—get lost in their imaginations and even when they play hooky, do it so they can check out the Art Institute of Chicago.
But trouble is closing in on their neighborhood.
As drugs, gangs and violence are slowly taking over Cabrini-Green, Dolores looks to get a new job, hours away in Peoria. It’s better money and, most importantly, hours away from the neighborhood’s trouble.
Trouble is, Eric is being left behind.
“How do you say goodbye to somebody?” Malik asks his mom.
“I don’t know that you ever do,” she says. “You carry them in your hearty wherever you go.”
A mixture of nostalgia and hard-edged reality, of bittersweet poetry and heartfelt relationships, “We Grown Now” is a nuanced look at the ties that bind and their importance, even when those ties begin to fray. The story is told against a bleak backdrop, but the veneer of social decay infused into the neighborhood does not extinguish the light emanating from the characters.
James and Ramirez hand in lovely, natural performances, despite a script that sometimes gives them an emotional intelligence that seems far beyond their tween years. Even then, the two are never less than charming, funny, and sometimes, a little heartbreaking. Both are gifted with expressive faces, and director Minhal Baig understands how to make their small, quiet interactions into big emotional moments.
“We Grown Now” is a stylized, haunting portrait of childhood, and the power of dreams to provide hope in an ever-changing world.
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