Take out the "gay overtones" and it's a film about a neglected black kid that spent the majority of his childhood alone. His mother worked nights, which left him home to fend for himself in an apartment with no hot water. The isolation led to him becoming extremely introverted and shy, almost to the point of being mute. His mother ends up becoming addicted to drugs, which strains an already strained relationship to the point that he starts to hate her. He finally develops a relationship with a male figure, though a complicated one because he hates drug dealers, and this man is a drug dealer. But this drug dealer teaches him simple but impactful lessons, and funny enough stops Chiron from being one of the 70% of black kids that don't know how to swim.
But when he loses that male figure, and his mom gets completely lost to drugs, he finds solace in the drug dealers wife. But he is made to feel guilty about his connection to her from his biological mother, and after being bullied in school, he finally loses it all and lashes out in a violent outrage. He moved to Atlanta and re-invited himself by building his body up, wearing grills and saggier clothes, buying the right car, listening to the "right" music, and becoming what he hated - a drug dealer.
The story comes full circle when his mother apologizes to him for the life she gave him, he admits to her that he loves her, and he is called out by a friend from school that who he became is not who he is, a harrowing truth that even his mentor experienced when he broke down from having to admit to being a drug dealer.
Even "taking out" the "gay stuff," this is a story about the complicated relationship between a son and single mother, a complicated relationship between drug dealers, drug abusers, and the people caught between, a complicated story about introverted black teens and how they have to front to fit in from childhood to "be hard" and not be perceived as a "soft ass nikka", which literally makes you a social outcast in this environment. But I would never "take out" the gay stuff, because sexuality is important too, and that only adds several more complicated relationships to an already nuanced film.
This is absolutely a coming of age film.
The movie had like a 95% rating
I didn't see any of that there wasn't an actual plot just Breh growing up as an undercover brother they skipped the whole jail seen and than he got out of jail and the story ended...
