Garden Heights: Last News

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer There has been no shortage of hip-hop star-is-born narratives hitting screens in recent years, but much like hip-hop itself for most of its history, there hasn’t always been a whole lot of space for women. Sanaa Lathan’s “On the Come Up,” which tracks a teenage girl’s complicated rise through the battle rap circuit to the even more complicated heights of viral stardom, provides a welcome exception to this rule, but fortunately it has a lot more going for it than just that. As frank and tough-minded and as it is warm and sweet, “On the Come Up” is a hugely promising debut from the actor-turned-director. Sixteen-year-old Bri (Jamila C. Gray) is already a talented rapper when we first meet her in her fictitious neighborhood of Garden Heights, and she’s already been through a whole lifetime’s worth of upheaval. Her father was a legendary local MC named Lawless, who was murdered just as his career was beginning to take off. She spent part of her childhood away from her mother (Lathan) while she battled drug addiction, and though she’s now clean, their mother-daughter bond has yet to fully mend. And what’s more, as part of the small contingent of Black students at her school, she’s forced to deal with unsympathetic administrators and suspicious campus cops, one of whom body-slams her to the ground after he spots her selling Skittles to a classmate.

On The Come Up, directed by actress turned director Sanaa Lathan and written by Zora Howard (Premature) and Kay Oyegun is based on the book by acclaimed author Angie Thomas (The Hate You Give). The film explores the many facets of Black girlhood through hip-hop music and the general music industry. On The Come Up book is 464 pages, and the movie tries to cram all that information in two hours which sometimes overshadows the messaging, but what works is that it speaks to a demographic that is often ignored and the culture of rap that is seldom explored from a woman’s perspective.