Critic Reviews

Every moment rings true, the vividly textured locations and knockabout relationships more visited than created.

Directed with bristling immediacy by Rashaad Ernesto Green (“Gun Hill Road”), Premature could be classified as a love story, a coming-of-age drama, a cautionary tale (the title offers a clue) and a portrait of young black women and men finding their way in contemporary New York. But it also strikes me as a movie about the uses and occasional uselessness of language, with stop-and-go verbal cadences that seem particularly attentive to what its characters say and don’t say.

It’s a gorgeous, shattering film. It’s an unapologetically real film about a number of very real subjects, plot-agnostic but driven by character, consequence and compassion.

A delicious slow-burn of a movie, the kind of coming-of-age tale that looks familiar on the surface only to reveal hidden depths of beauty and meaning.

In a movie landscape cluttered with coming of age stories, it’s worth asking what distinguishes a straightforward example such as Premature. Two things do – authenticity and Zora Howard. Howard is a breakout talent and she endows this story with grace and passion.

Premature is teen love portrayed in an adult manner. Its grit and realism distinguish it from other teen love stories that force sappy, profound one-liners meant only for a good trailer moment.

Premature captures that unexpected, earth-shattering moment in life when you realize adulthood, real adulthood, is not so simple and cute. It’s difficult, it’s scary, and it’s heartbreaking at times. That’s what Howard’s beautiful performance conveys.

Premature doesn’t break much new ground. But it sure breaks hearts.

The film’s most telling scene unfortunately marks a steep divide between the fine-tuned first half and a back end that threatens to crumble into cliche.

At times, Premature has the same fly-on-the-wall, near-improvisational and casually meandering qualities of a Cassavetes film, though its refreshingly honest and direct depiction of Black sexuality made me think of early Spike Lee or Bill Gunn.