The two boys in the gauzy nostalgia piece “We Grown Now” are total charmers. They’re also worryingly vulnerable, something you clock soon after the movie opens. Set in 1992, it takes place primarily in Cabrini-Green, at the time a public housing development in Chicago. There, the boys frolic and dream amid cinder block walls. Every so often, they wander outside to the concrete playground and to a jumble of old mattresses that the local kids use as cushioning. One boy likes to vault through the air and onto the mattresses; he likes to fly.
The two boys are around 10 years old, and the closest of friends. They live in the same broken-down tower building, one of several in the complex, where sometimes they hang out in an abandoned apartment. There, they like to talk and stare at the stained and cracked ceiling, conjuring up visions from it the way they might do under the sheltering dome of the sky. Malik (Blake Cameron James) turns out to be an especially dreamy child, a pint-size philosopher who lives with his loving mother (Jurnee Smollett), doting grandma (S. Epatha Merkerson) and sister (Madisyn Barnes), a typical if benign sibling thorn in his side.
For his part, Malik’s best friend, the more prosaically drawn Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), lives with his older sister (Avery Holliday) and their father (Lil Rel Howery), a kindly fount of praise and disappointment. The friendship between Eric and Malik — the child performers are dear — is one of the truest parts of the movie, and it’s easy to fall quickly into step with them as they wander Cabrini, head to school and one day briefly escape from their routine. Bored one day while in class, the boys jump on a train and eventually make it to the Art Institute of Chicago, where they roam its galleries, at one point pausing before Walter Ellison’s striking painting “Train Station,” a 1935 canvas that depicts a segregated terminal.
Their interest in the painting is easy to believe: It’s beautiful, arresting and at once familiar and mysterious (as the child of a former museum guard, I can relate). At the same time, like so much of this movie, the scene also feels forced, partly because the writer-director Minhal Baig’s expressionistic reveries don’t always fit with the issues she recurrently invokes. When the boys run through the museum, the other patrons remain frozen in place, as if they were in a different dimension. Yet when Malik connects the painting to his grandmother’s home in Mississippi, he opens a window onto a profound history that’s too heavy for this otherwise fanciful scene. He also sounds more like a filmmaking conceit than a child, however wise.
This is the third feature movie that Baig has directed, and it certainly has qualities to appreciate. As she demonstrated in her second, “Hala” (2019), about a Pakistani American teenager navigating the divide between her parents’ lives and her blossoming desires, Baig knows how to create sympathetic characters. You’re immediately invested in Malik and Eric, who together have formed a private world that, like the museum, exists apart from real life, its pressures and its dangers. The sound design is particularly effective at conveying the little bubble that the children have created for themselves. The babble of outside voices and music in Cabrini never seems to stop flowing, but you never really hear what anyone says.
At one point, the real world does catastrophically pierce the boys’ bubble when a near-army of police descend on the complex in the wake of a shooting, ransacking homes and turning residents into suspects. This violence gives the story dramatic tension, creating a crisis in Malik’s life when his mother considers moving elsewhere. The police raid also widens his (and the movie’s) horizons when he learns that his grandparents moved to Cabrini to escape the violence in their Southern hometown. Some of this is effective, even if too many of Baig’s filmmaking choices — the honeyed cinematography, the score’s agitated violins and Malik’s preternaturally knowing voice-over — finally overwhelm the story’s fragile lyrical realism.
We Grown Now
Rated PG for images of police violence. Running time 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.
