On the Come Up Review: Once Upon a Rap

Sanaa Lathan’s On the Come Up tells the story of Brianna Jackson (Jamila C. Gray), a 16-year old rapper, though it has to compete with Brianna herself, who does more than her share of telling. “Once upon a time there was a girl named Bri,” she says, in voiceover, as if bracing us for a fairy tale. Indeed, though the film is set in the decidedly non-magical neighborhood of Garden Heights, it gets by on the lows and fanciful highs that hold court in that genre. Brianna’s deceased father, who went by the sobriquet of “Lawless,” was a local legend, and she makes regular pilgrimages to a vast mural of him, painted on the side of a warehouse.

After her husband’s death, Brianna’s mother, Jayda (Lathan), became mired in addiction, temporarily leaving Brianna and her brother, Trey (Titus Makin), in the care of their grandparents. The relationship between mother and daughter still bears the cracks of that early abandonment, and Brianna, as if insuring herself against future trouble, hedges her parental bets. She spends much time with her Aunt Pooh (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who drives a lime-green Oldsmobile, deals drugs, and keeps a gun tucked in her waistband. As bets go, she’s hardly the safest, but it’s Pooh who supports Brianna’s lyrical talents, taking her to a nearby club where rap battles are held. “This is the ring,” Brianna tells us, “the Hunger Games of hip-hop.”

It’s a clunky line, like an ill-fitting elevator pitch. The film was adapted by Kay Oyegun from Angie Thomas’s young-adult novel of the same name. While it would be a thrill to report that Brianna, in solidarity with the heroine of The Hunger Games, equips herself with a longbow and butts heads with her oppressors, no such twists are in store. The arrows remain strictly verbal.

Against the advice of Aunt Pooh, Brianna starts to collaborate with Supreme, a wealthy producer, and an old friend of her father’s. As played by Method Man, Supreme supplies On the Come Up with a dose of charming darkness. One look at him, sat in his glassy mansion, or encastled in a gloomy Escalade, and you know he’s bad news. But you can’t help feeling relieved as he reassures Brianna of her gifts, and furnishes her efforts in the recording studio with envelopes of cash. After all, she needs the money to support her family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B7AXY4xXyQ

In a telling scene, Jayda calls her daughter, who’s been taken to a luxurious hotel in Atlanta by Supreme. Back in Garden Heights, the power has been shut off in the Jackson house, and On the Come Up cuts from the warm candlelight that envelops Jayda to the cold blue glow of the hotel pool, in which Brianna dips her feet. In this moment, director of photography Eric Branco neatly illuminates the tension between love and money.

On the Come Up is fundamentally a cautionary fable about the relative merits of selling out versus those of staying true to oneself. This is exemplified by Supreme, who extolls the virtues of pretending to be someone else. “I play the damn role,” he says, gesturing to his tailored suit. At his behest, Brianna records a song riddled with calls to violence—exactly the sort of pre-packaged image that’s doomed to sell, in other words—and the result, predictably, is that violence comes to call. That predictability, though, is hardly a problem.

There are heartbreaks, reconciliations, and rap showdowns in all the places you would expect, and you may find yourself smirking as each story beat lands—not at the lack of surprise on offer, but at how little it matters to On the Come Up’s appeal. As Brianna so fiercely demonstrates, the beats are merely the backing with which you seize your audience.

None of which would work without Gray, who gives Brianna gravity without weighing her down. Her full-bream smiles are the biggest surprises in On the Come Up. Even though she’s saddled with lumpen lines, particularly in Brianna’s rhyming narration (“Good. One word, one syllable. If I could, I’d give everything I should to make my family good”), Gray lends credibility to this young woman, who happens to be searching for just that. She plays the damn role.