“We Grown Now,” the third feature of writer-director Minhal Baig, is a sentimental coming-of-age tale, a period piece nostalgic for Chicago’s stigmatized and long-gone Cabrini Green high-rise housing project.

That’s just the first way this lovely and intimate film upends expectations and challenges the viewer to see the world differently.

The two tweens who grow up in “the projects” — Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) — are not overtly victims of their circumstances. Each lives in a single-parent household, but Malik’s mom (a radiant Jurnee Smollett) and grandmom (S. Epatha Merkerson, earthy and nurturing) and Eric’s dad (Lil Rel Howery, wholly serious for once) are wholly engaged in their lives and invested in their futures.

Mother Dolores may just be “trying to hold onto to the little we’ve got.” Dad Jason might be struggling to make ends meet with a pizza joint job and teach his Eric the math of home economics — how much it takes them to just get by.

But these kids are well-cared for, curious about the world to the point of being idealized “screenwriter” creations. Middle schoolers of any race and any locale aren’t known for skipping school to check out Walter Ellison paintings and a Georges Seurat exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

There’s little of the street argot and pervasive cultural rot often depicted in stories in such settings. When violence intrudes on their world, it may be a part of a trend that is politicized as it is presented on TV — drugs, guns and the random, murderous violence that connects them.

So Malik and Eric have room to dream, to pile old mattresses in the playground to “jump” and bounce into the sky with, DIY trampolines aimed at the heavens and a better future.

They swap jokes — “How do you make a tissue dance? You put a little ‘boogie’ into it.” They imagine the cosmos in a water-stained ceiling. They revel in a rare ride on The El. And they tell each other of their pasts, and a little about their hopes for the future.

Malik’s grandma reminds him he is one generation removed from Tupelo, Mississippi, and the racism his mother and grandparents fled. Eric’s dad passes on sage advice about grudges and the “life’s too short” reasons for letting go of them.

Baig — “Hala” was her break-out film — tests these lives and this friendship in a lot of conventional ways, a random shooting death, a police crackdown that upends ordinary, working class lives. The story’s turn towards a climax is yet another way it gives in to the tried-and-true of tales in this setting.

Everything’s a tad neat and scrubbed — including the child actors, their characters’ spotless Adidas and Chuck Taylors, and their dialogue. But the sweetness, the lived-in feeling of the characters and their world lift this gentle drama and recommend it.

It’s not a gritty recreation of a pretty grim place that was knocked-down for a reason. “We Grown Now” lets us see Cabrini Green and its people through the rose-colored glasses of memory, and reminds us of how universal that sentimentalizing process is. It wasn’t the buildings and the politics that created them and knocked them down that’s worth recalling. It’s the lives lived there, their hopes and dreams — realized or deferred — that matter.

Rating: PG, adult themes

Cast: Blake Cameron James, Jurnee Smollett, S. Epatha Merkerson, Gian Knight Ramirez and Lil Rel Howery

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Minhal Baig. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:34