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

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.

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.

“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.