An Exploited Neighborhood, Seen Through Children’s Eyes

Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

In We Grown Now, elementary-school-age best friends Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) attend the funeral of another child they didn’t personally know but in whose abbreviated life story they recognize themselves. Dantrell Davis was walking to school with his mother in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood when he was killed in an act of random gun violence (an actual event from October 1992 that We Grown Now integrates into its fictionalized narrative); either Malik or Eric could have been shot in the head, too, if they were in that place at that time. As the boys sit on church stairs, arguing about what happened to Dantrell after his death — heaven or nothing, paradise or emptiness — their expressive faces, showing distress and shock and weariness, give We Grown Now a heart-piercing quality. Director and writer Minhal Baig’s third film sometimes feels too archetypal and too meditative, as if its broad reverence for childhood innocence and human optimism comes at the expense of character details. But We Grown Now also houses James’s and Ramirez’s sensitive, compassionate, and fearless performances, and the pair’s efforts are precious.

Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, a public housing development overseen by the Chicago Housing Authority, has a specific cinematic history: The iconic Norman Lear sitcom Good Times was implied to be set there, and both the 1992 and 2021 versions of Candyman interrogated its legacy. Baig is from Chicago, but she acknowledges that her childhood version of the city “began where I lived and ended somewhere downtown,� well away from Cabrini-Green. Her research process for the film involved speaking to former residents along with activists, historians, and journalists about what made the neighborhood special, how it was affected by the racism of the police force and city government, and the impact of its lengthy destruction (the last of the high-rises came down in 2011) on the community.

We Grown Now is clearly shaped by this history — its tone is a mixture of reverence for the refuge Cabrini-Green originally provided to Black Americans who moved north during the Great Migration to escape the oppression of Jim Crow, and sorrow for the way the city allowed the buildings to fall into disrepair. But the film isn’t overly interested in the details of how any of this happened. Instead, it unfolds primarily from the perspectives of its child protagonists, who experience their building’s decay through details like a leaky faucet that hasn’t been fixed in months (the steady drip-drip-drip of the water is an omnipresence in the film’s sound mix) and the city’s growing authoritarianism through an early-morning police raid and forcibly issued ID cards that they’re supposed to carry at all times. (We Grown Now was co-produced by the social-justice-minded studio Participant, which just announced it’s shutting down. The industry is bleak.) Perhaps this approach leaves We Grown Now feeling too stripped down, too content with Cabrini-Green as an abstract place to which things happen instead of where things happen. But what the movie cares about most (and where it finds the most fertile emotional ground) is Malik and Eric and how they experience Cabrini-Green. They imagine an abandoned apartment as a portal to the stars and stack found mattresses into an impromptu crash pad, and their playground is a riot of color from Hula-Hoops, chalk drawings, and jump ropes.

The story around the boys is simple. Friends since birth, Malik and Eric are inseparable; they talk through the walls of their apartments in Cabrini-Green, sit next to each other at school, and share their dreams and feelings. Baig and cinematographer Pat Scola set the camera in doorframes as the boys traipse around their apartment building, under the boys’ bodies as they jump onto those playground mattresses, and up close to their faces as they swap secrets, often using natural light to create impressionistic and painterly shots that feel warm and organic. James and Ramirez slip into an easy intimacy that conveys years of familiarity. It wouldn’t have hurt We Grown Now to have presented more details about who the boys are outside of their bond — how they decorate their bedrooms, what their favorite subjects are in school, if they’ve ever had a crush. But we get a sense of their childhood’s wholesomeness, enough that it jars us when two events disrupt it. First is the death of Dantrell, which links Cabrini-Green to the city’s outside violence and white police force, terrifying Malik’s mother, Dolores (Jurnee Smollett), his grandmother, Anita (S. Epatha Merkerson), and Eric’s father, Jason (Lil Rel Howery). And second is Dolores’s possible promotion, for which Malik and his family would have to move outside of Chicago, away from the apartment that’s been their home for decades and away from Eric.

Baig seems drawn to coming-of-age narratives (her previous film, Hala, was about Geraldine Viswanathan’s character trying to find a balance between her Muslim faith, her Pakistani American family’s conservatism, and her own independence and identity), but We Grown Now cleverly ages its characters down to elementary school, a time when you have no control, really, over what your elders and guardians choose to do. That allows the film to focus not on the boys fighting this decision, but on them struggling to accept it, and their realization that certain things — like another boy’s death, or an unsympathetic authoritarian force, or a city changing around you — can only be processed, not reversed.

Within that framework, James and Ramirez aren’t asked to overact or overemote. Instead, they shine as silent observers and watchful sponges: James hunches his body, curled away from the edge of a wall so as not to be spotted, as Malik eavesdrops on Dolores and Anita’s hushed nighttime whispers. Ramirez turns toward Jason, eyes wide open, as his father reminisces lovingly about Eric’s deceased mother. We Grown Now’s story beats recall other boys’ growing-up stories like Mud and Chop Shop (the latter’s filmmaker, Ramin Bahrani, is thanked in We Grown Now’s credits); its dreamlike visuals at times echo The Tree of Life and The Last Black in San Francisco; and its focus on inner-city children drifting apart as they grow older and realize how racism, classism, and place will mold their lives calls to mind the inimitable fourth season of The Wire. James and Ramirez are so distinct, though, that they take that familiarity and infuse it with a bittersweet whimsy that will tear pieces out of your heart.