Stories of inner-city youth are nothing new these days. Filmmakers have been making them in some form for decades now. Even going back to the days of The Bowery Boys, The latest story of inner city youth is called We Grown Now, by writer/director Minhal Baig. It’s a tale of one boy and his family getting out of a bad housing development and another not. 

Malik (Blake Cameron James) and his friend Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) are two little boys who are inseparable. They go to the same school together and live in the same housing development called Cabrini Green, with their families, named after the Patron Saint of Immigrants, Malik’s mother Dolores (Jurnee Smolett) is a hard-working woman who is looking to her family’s situation. They also live with Anita (S Epatha Merkerson), who is Malik’s grandmother. Eric lives with his father, Jason (Lil Rel Howery), and his sister Amber (Avety Holiday). They are all struggling to make ends meet, but things get a lot worse.

Malik and Eric do everything together. One of their favorite things to do is to get a mattress from an abandoned apartment and print it outside so they can jump on it in an acrobatic fashion. It helps them pass the time and stay out of trouble. The problem is that these boys are bored and curious and can’t help getting into trouble. They help each other chant at school, and when things get boring, they run away and go on adventures together downtown to see museums.  Taking the train to get there and lying, why are they out of school? It reminds me of my youth to some extent growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts. 

The adventures these boys had weren’t the only thing that reminded me of my youth growing up. Even though I’m not Black I had a very difficult upbringing in Lowell. I lived in a place called whores fish market, upstairs, it was infested with roaches. As a kid, I didn’t know any better. I had to sleep in the same bed with my two brothers and we had a roof over our heads. It’s all we knew. Not until later did I realize how bad of a situation it was. We made the most of a bad situation though. The same as the families in this film.

With my brothers, I did some questionable things when I was a little boy. I just wanted a better life and some of the things other kids had. Similar to the boys in this movie we just wanted to pass the time and get our minds off the struggles of our parents. The two main parents in this film, played by Jurnee Smollett and Lil Rel Howery, do what they think is best for their families. One gets a better job opportunity and moves their family away while the other stays and toys to make a go of it in this bad place to live. The ’90s were the beginning of very bad/violent times in Chicago. They didn’t just have the Bulls to fall back on.

This movie deals with some pretty bad things during this time in Chicago, but it glosses over some of the bigger problems it could have addressed. There was an underlying problem with the city government as well as the police that could be addressed more effectively.  The police come across as bullies and they invade the premises without warning. The community just sits there, they scream and yell, but they don’t do much about these invasions of privacy. Chicago has gotten a lot worse since these days. 

The film also glosses over some of the reasons why these things are happening.  Drugs and crime have infested South Chicago and they are barely mentioned in this story. If you’re going to tell tales of bad times like this then you need to go fully bad. Show me more violence and dangerous circumstances not gloss over them like they were barely an issue. I even wanted to see more aspects dealing with racist cops and biased government officials, like the Chicago Housing Authority. We got barely anything in this regard. Baig as a writer doesn’t go to the levels she needs to go to make this story more effective.  

We Grown Now is a good movie. It’s just not a great movie like it could have been. It deals with a difficult coming-of-age story but doesn’t go to the lengths it needs to as a script. The writing by Baig should have been more hard-hitting. The direction is fine by Baig and so is the acting, but it’s failed by a subpar script that glosses over the real problems this film should have been discussing.  The two boys in the film have potential as actors and hopefully, they get more opportunities in the future. This movie didn’t do them or their performances any justice. 

2 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen