We Grown Now Review: Childhood Joy and Trauma in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes

Set in and around Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing complex in 1992, writer-director Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now follows best friends Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), who were born and raised in the low-income housing project most people associate with its high crime and poverty rates. For the two boys, though, Cabrini-Green is neither abhorrent nor an aberration, but rather a self-contained world containing all their hopes and dreams, and which they leave only to walk to elementary school.

Told primarily from Malik’s point of view, the film delicately captures both the wonder and tunnel vision of adolescence, particularly through its depiction of the built-in defense mechanism that is his imagination. In the opening scene, Malik and Eric take an old mattress from an abandoned apartment and, after realizing the elevator is broken, drag it down several flights of stairs and outside, where they use it to brace their fall during a jumping game. As Malik says to Eric and other neighborhood kids, “All that matters is if you can jump,” and it’s the innocence of this sentiment, and the single-mindedness of the friends’ pursuits, that allows them to fully enjoy their childhoods without being weighed down by the perils around them.

In another scene, the duo lies on the ground, staring intensely at a water stain on the ceiling until it eventually morphs into an expansive star-filled sky. Such scenes clearly speak to the resilience of children and their innate ability to find beauty amid the mundane and dilapidated. But Baig doesn’t ignore or sanitize the near-decrepit state of the Cabrini-Green housing complex, instead presenting it in a matter-of-fact manner. Ugliness surrounds the boys, but they’re effectively blinded to the pervasive dangers until, finally, they aren’t.

Following the accidental shooting death of one of their classmates, Malik and Eric are increasingly confronted by the harsh realities of their surroundings. First, they’re forced to carry ID cards just to enter their housing complex. Then, in a particularly traumatic scene, police officers bombard Malik’s home in the middle of the night, searching for drugs as part of a massive, and likely illegal, sweep of apartments in the Cabrini–Green homes.

There’s the distinct sense that Malik is being more directly confronted with the encroaching responsibilities of adulthood as a Black male, along with the prejudices that come with it. But Baig prudently keeps Malik anchored in the liminal state between adolescence and young adulthood, understanding that even being suddenly thrust into situations fraught with danger will not instantly shake her protagonist free of his childish ways.

We Grown Now also offers glimpses of a broader perspective of life in the Cabrini-Green homes through a handful of scenes centered on Malik’s mom, Dolores (Jurnee Smollett). Sequences of her struggling against the institutional racism at her corporate HR job and trying to keep her son sheltered from the intensifying violence surrounding them help to ground the film in a grittier reality, preventing it from ever feeling overly precious.

We Grown Now does occasionally feel a bit unmoored by its general lack of a clear narrative through line, at least until tensions develop between Malik and Eric when the former learns that his best friend may be moving away. And there are several lines of dialogue from the boys that feel a tad overwritten or too on the nose, as in a mercifully brief scene of Malik and Eric repeatedly shouting “We exist!” from a balcony. But the film is held together by the universal strength of its performances, particularly James and Smollett, and the elegance with which it veers between dreamy interludes and poetic flourishes stemming from Malik’s imagination and the more quotidian presentation of the small world he lives in, warts and all.