‘We Grown Now’: Toronto Review

Dir: Minhal Baig. US. 2023. 93mins 

Chicago’s infamous housing project, Cabrini-Green, is the perilous setting for intimate early-90s period piece We Grown Now. Renewing the coming of age roots she planted in her debut feature Hala, writer-director Minhal Baig captures two Black kids navigating systemic racism, brutal policing and broken promises, while imagining an unlikely better life. An unassuming character study set to poetic rhythms makes for an empathetic study of Black life, full of resolve. This evocative coming of age film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Centerpiece section. Supported by a mostly unknown cast, the film’s crowd-pleasing sentiments should be a boom for indie lovers.

An unassuming character study set to poetic rhythms make for an empathetic study of Black life

Taking place in autumn 1992, We Grown Now begins with a view down a dilapidated hallway as the distant sounds of hip hop, passing cars, and squeaky sneakers colour the scene. Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) enter the frame dragging a stained, cream hued mattress. The young boys pull the pad to a playground where other mattresses are splayed out, the kids jumping on them in an activity they call flying. Oblique images — girls hula hooping, stretched out shadows of jump roping, immersive close-ups of Malik’s face dappled by sunshine, intercut with him floating in the air – and composer Jay Wadley’s dulcet strings gently repeating recalls the lyrical opening montage of Joe Tablot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

An ebullient, jocular kid, Malik loves telling his hardworking mother Dolores (Jurnee Smollett) corny jokes. “How do birds keep cool,” he asks. “Bird-conditioning.” Dolores is a doting mother; she works long hours as an accountant, taking home meagre pay to support Malik, her daughter and the matriarchal heart of the family, Anita (a sage S Epatha Merkerson). They occupy a modest apartment in Cabrini-Green, filled with sunlight and warmth yet surrounded on the outside by danger.  

When Anita migrated North with her now deceased husband decades before, they looked at Cabrini-Green as a golden opportunity away from the South’s prejudice. Anita recalls how the high rises, built after World War II, were once filled with children playing, friendly neighbours and a sense of community. Racism and economic disparity ultimately choked the area into poverty and violence. Anita also recalls the life she left behind in the South; an image baked in nostalgia. But when Malik asks her if she’d ever go back, she wistfully shakes her head no. 

We Grown Now notices the contradictions of loving a place for the good, while acknowledging its insurmountable sorrows. Baig’s lithe script tells viewers why Black folks departed the now demolished Cabrini-Green during the 1990s, paralleling it with the Black community’s contemporary exodus from Chicago. Searching for a higher income, Dolores — who falls disappointingly into the Black motherhood film trope — takes a better job in Peoria, moving the family away from the police (they’ve been raiding Cabrini-Green since a young local kid was gunned down) and the area’s looming violence and impoverished schools.

If Anita is the film’s heart, then the friendship shared by Malik and Eric is its interpersonal beauty. Recalling Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the boys leave class to ride the city’s trains until arriving at the Art Institute, where they catch sight of Black painter Walter Ellison’s ‘Train Station.’ From their building the boys also shout self-affirming phrases like “I exist”, and lay on disused mattresses dreaming of big houses and large yards. The prospects of upheaval fracture Malik and Eric’s close bond. Malik wants to leave, the vivid sound of train whistles often filling his head, and a jilted Eric knows life will be emptier without his friend. The young actors James and Ramirez provide uncommon interiority, even as Eric suffers from a thin backstory — we barely catch glimpses of his father Jason (Lil Rel Howery).

Lensed from a childlike perspective, the vantage point sometimes restricts the narrative to fascicle observations (Malik’s limited grasp of the surrounding violence is shocking) while imbuing the visual language with the kind of innocence that locates meaning in simple objects; the texture of Anita’s orange handmade curtains and the fractured observations of familial pain that catch Malik’s eye. Ultimately it’s the two child actors who land this brisk film’s last breaths, delivering a final line which invites well-earned tears for a friendship redefined and a future finally attained.