In a touching portrait of childhood friendship, the child-focused WE GROWN NOW captures the magic and innocence of childhood, even one where the two inseparable friends, elementary-school age boys, are growing up in poverty in a housing project that later became infamous for violence and a symbol of urban decay, Chicago’s Cabrini-Green. But in the early 1990s, when this story is set, all that is still in the future although very much on the horizon. Like FLORIDA PROJECT, the story is told from a child point-of-view, as the boys play and explore their world with all the joy and curiosity of childhood.
The real appeal of this moving drama is in performances of the two young actors playing these friends, performances filled with believability and an inescapable appeal and charm. The story is largely told through their eyes, with childhood’s limited view of the world. Their housing complex is falling into physical decay yet the playground is still joyous and filled with children, and the boys are embraced by their loving, stable families, albeit financially-struggling ones.
Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) are inseparable life-long friends, who are next-door neighbors in the Cabrini-Green housing project. The housing complex is filled with families, and many of the parents, like Malik’s mother Dolores (Jurnee Smollett) have grown up there, raised by her mother Anita (S. Epatha Merkerson) who moved to the then-new housing with her husband and daughter, fleeing the Jim Crow South with the Great Migration.
Although the buildings are falling into disrepair, with trash in hallways, a leaking faucet in their apartment that has gone un-repaired despite months of calls to maintenance, and empty apartments, there is family history there.
In an opening scene, the boys take an abandoned mattress from one such apartment, not to sleep on, but to use on the playground to practice their jumping. Another pair of abandoned mattresses in an empty apartment becomes a place for the boys to dream about the world, talk about the future, and imagine a starry sky overhead.
In fact, the boys’ apartments are neat, clean and well-kept homes. Both boys are being raised by single parents who work hard at low-paid jobs. Eric is being raised by his widower father along with his older sister while is being raised by his mother and grandmother. The stable, loving families, and the boys’ parents view of the housing complex as safe and familiar, allows the boys the freedom to play and roam with other children carefree. They attend the local school with other neighborhood children, another orderly, safe place, where they study and share.
Scenes in the playground, surrounded by children jumping rope and engaged in games, and classroom scenes, provide the setting for the boys’ conversations, which are remarkable in their naturalness and childhood charm. There are adventures too, one when they skip school to ride the train into the city and spend the day to the Art Institute and exploring other Chicago sites. Their carefree comfort with exploring their world echoes universal childhood impulses.
Director Minhal Baig grew up in Chicago although in a more prosperous neighborhood area than that of Cabrini-Green but she researched Cabrini Green and its history, and also interviewed people who lived there to build a more human, fuller picture of living there. Baig recalled her childhood view of her city being limited to the parts of it she experienced, from her neighborhood to downtown, and that same sense of childhood’s limited view suffuses WE GROWN NOW, which also reflects how young children like these two boys are largely at the mercy of the decisions of adults in their lives. This story is set at a time of change for Cabrini Green, as it falls into disrepair and the neighborhood around it becomes more dangerous and violent. WE GROWN NOW uses the parents’ personal stories to recap the history of the place, a housing project originally built for war veterans but which by the early 1990s was falling into disrepair, and eventually became a watch-word for urban decay by the time the last buildings were brought down in about 2011. The boys’ story is set at a time when as the neighborhood is changing, as the boys themselves are growing and changing, although they actually are far from grown by the film’s ends, just at a transition point that will impact their lives.
Director Baig incorporates a real event in 1992 in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood into this story, the death of a boy accidentally killed by a stray bullet while walking down the street. The event plays a role as a pivotal point in the film, with the boys attending the child’s funeral and then discussing life, death and wondering if there is an afterlife. Meanwhile, the sudden random act of violence jolts their parents, changing the adults’ view of a neighborhood they had thought of as safe, in which their children could be free to roam.
The sudden violence is combined with other changes that further alarm their parents. The housing complex becomes the focus of police, in the grip of the War On Drugs, who rouse all residents at 2am for complex-wide warrant-less searches for drugs, leaving apartments in disarray. There are new rules, along with new mandatory ID for residents, even small children, and intrusive security restrictions. The changing environment, and opportunity for a promotion, prompts hard decisions that threaten to separate the inseparable boys.
The focus on the two young friends, and their child-view world, makes this drama both magical and heartbreaking, as the world shifts around them. The young actors are so good in this film, and their believable bond so strong and so moving, that it gives the story about a specific place and time both a timelessness and universality, and a powerful emotional pull. As the film notes at its end, a place is really made of its people, and our memories of them.
WE GROWN NOW opens Friday, Apr. 26, in theaters.
RATING: 3.5 out of 4 stars
