We Grown Now is an artful corrective to the public perception of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes, a government housing project which was synonymous—from my childhood perch in the Chicago suburbs thanks to hysterical local news reports and scary movies like Candyman—with violent crime and societal decay. With We Grown Now, Chicago-raised writer-director Minhal Baig takes us to 1992 Cabrini and offers a very different, though not naive, portrait: that of the friendship of two young boys (Blake Cameron James and Gian Knight Ramirez) living in one of the project’s high-rise buildings, raised by loving, hard-working families who are just trying to live their lives one day at a time. The supple lighting, soft focus, and stirring score—along with irrepressible images of the boys at play, dragging abandoned mattresses into a pile on which to launch themselves, as if they were flying—all work together to foreground the joyful, resilient humanity of those who called Cabrini home. In this, it’s reminiscent of another Chicago-set movie, Cooley High, though in style We Grown Now combines the angelic nostalgia of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and the hardscrabble child’s play of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. If the movie’s straightforward dramatic and dialogue scenes don’t have the same delicacy as its more poetic gestures—especially once increasing crime, police harassment, and discriminatory housing policies close in on these two families—the film still stirs the soul as a counter-document to alarmist history. With Jurnee Smollett as the mother of one of the boys and Lil Rel Howery as the father of the other.
(4/21/2024)
