‘Premature’ and growing up through love — movie review

Premature follows teen poet Ayanna as she navigates love, friendship, and adulthood in the last summer months before college

Premature begins with electricity. The only kind of electricity you can find on a crowded New York City subway in the summer — well, crowded for a movie version of New York at least. Ayanna (co-screenwriter Zora Howard), a black teen poet, is spaced out watching a couple make out passionately as her friends talk around her. She notices a group of men staring at them and calls one of them over to give his number to her friend. It's that tenacity the quickly endears us to her. She may seem mature, but eventually, we're reminded that when we meet her she's just seventeen and looking forward to getting away to college. 

The beginning of Premature develops like Weekend or even Before Sunrise. Ayanna and her friends are watching a pickup game of basketball in their Harlem neighborhood — you can feel the vibes of summer in New York — when she spots a new face. Isaiah (Joshua Boone) and Ayanna lock eyes — then begin to fall immediately. The screenplay, that Howard co-wrote with director Rashaad Ernesto Green based on the short film of the same name, lets us fall with them. In just ten minutes, we know who Isaiah is and we start to understand that Ayanna is hiding who she wants to be as any 17-year-old on the precipice of adulthood would.

Green directs each of their scenes with so much intimacy that is usually so hard to translate onto film. The first time they have sex it starts aggressively — like two bodies yearning for each other crashing together — before Isaiah slows it down by playing one of his late father's old jazz records. The focus on touch and their bodies is reminiscent of how Barry Jenkins tenderly portrays love in his films. Green clearly has been studying. 

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In the first act, you forget that Ayanna is still really a kid living at home counting down the days to college. And her whirlwind romance with Isaiah starts to remind us of that. There are moments of soaring romance — a conversation at sunset on the Hudson, a rooftop love session — and devastating realism — old flames and the always burgeoning future — all connected by Ayanna's sensitively written poems. 

Howard is remarkable as the starry-eyed but witty and tough Ayanna. She portrays her as a girl that feels she has it all figured out yet hasn't faced the challenges of an adult yet truly. Those challenges come on the outskirts like when her mother asks her how she expects to pay for school or a heated discussion about police brutality and harassment boils over. Largely, though, it's an internal struggle for her rather than one affected by society, as a whole. Green said, “there was an overabundance of black films with narratives driven by themes of black victimization, black fear, and black pain.” Premature is rooted in the black experience but portrays it for its beauty.

The movie starts to swerve into cliches as it slowly creeps towards its finale and maybe goes on a single beat too long. However, this is a reminder of how powerful quiet indie cinema can be when it's rooted in a clear point of view and place. It feels distinctly New York and black and female — which means you should seek out black voices talking about the film like these reviews from Nijla Mu'min and Carla Renata — but at the same time warmly familiar of a time when you were ready to be old but were still young.