This Isn’t Neverland

Given the small number of major studio releases that focus on issues within the black community, let alone the specific segment “Baby Boy” deals with, it’s easy to empathize with the sense of urgency writer-director John Singleton must have felt in making this compelling but problematic film.

Yet that same insistence seems to have influenced Singleton to be more of a polemicist than a dramatist, causing his seriocomic romantic melodrama to be wildly erratic and uneven. A story of Peter Pan in the ‘hood, of a lost boy who can’t or won’t grow up, “Baby Boy” is heartfelt and personal as it attempts to deal with something real, but its increasing desperation to get everything said leads it to stumble over itself. It is a Polaroid snapshot that’s finally in too much of a hurry to be fully developed.

From its opening shot of a naked, adult black man curled up in a womb with a giant umbilical cord, “Baby Boy” utilizes the vivid, direct imagery of a comic book (albeit a very adult one) to make its points. This image goes along with a brief voice-over about a psychological theory that posits that racism has, in effect, infantilized young American black men.

That embryonic man in the womb is Jody (singer and MTV veejay Tyrese Gibson), officially introduced eating candy and waiting outside L.A.’s Leimert Park Women’s Clinic to drive his girlfriend Yvette (Taraji P. Henson) home from having an abortion.

It’s not that Jody is opposed to having children. Far from it. He already has a child with Yvette, and another one with his other “baby mama” Peanut (Tamara LaSeon Bass). What he doesn’t want to do is get in any way committed, let alone married, to either a woman or a job.

Just as big a kid in his own way as his tiny children, 20-year-old Jody lives at home with his mother, Juanita (A.J. Johnson), and hangs with his violence-prone best friend Sweetpea (Omar Gooding, Cuba’s younger brother). “One thing I know how to do,” he boasts, “is make pretty babies,” and though the women in his life are continually and understandably exasperated with him, he sees no need for further accomplishments.

Things start to change when Juanita, only in her mid-30s herself, decides she deserves a life of her own. She takes up with Melvin (Ving Rhames at his most super-intense), a tattooed and muscular landscaper who flaunts his O.G. (original gangster) past when he tells Jody, “I seen it all and I done it all to the full.”

Soon Melvin is spending all his time at the house with Juanita, drinking up the Kool-Aid and engaging in so much passionate sex it keeps Jody up at night and makes him worry that his mother will force him to move out. Adding to his problems, Yvette’s ex-boyfriend, an evil gangbanger named Rodney (rapper Snoop Dogg), is released from jail just looking for trouble.

Though Jody is no stranger to violence and has been in prison himself, “Baby Boy” takes pains to paint him as basically not a bad kid. Aimless, rootless, maybe even borderline amoral, yes, but more than anything someone who can’t seem to help being irresolute and weak.

It’s in fact one of the characteristics of “Baby Boy” that many of its characters are prone to making mistakes, even Melvin. Convincingly played by Rhames, up to and including a show-stopping nude shot, Melvin’s darker past keeps threatening to reemerge, though the man has somewhere learned to meekly confess, “I made a mistake, I’m sorry” when he’s caught in a misdeed.

All this probably makes “Baby Boy” sound like a more successful picture than it is. Yes, it’s a relevant story, as you’d expect from the writer-director of “Boyz N the Hood,” but the plot points and dramatic ideas tend to be contrived and conventional, and there’s a didacticism, a lack of subtlety and sophistication, in the presentation.

“Baby Boy” is also notable for the rawness and sexual specificity of its often raunchy language. The words feel authentic to these particular characters, but the pedestrian nature of what they’re saying when they’re not talking dirty is an additional hindrance to the film’s success.

With a contrived ending that leaves too many questions unanswered, “Baby Boy” is at once too neat and too messy, but films like this are too rare to leave it at that. Ragged but ambitious, it retains a core of genuine emotion despite its agitprop leanings. Like its characters, this picture is doing the best it can, and although that may not be everything, it ought to count for something.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong sexuality, language, violence and some drug use. Times guidelines: several explicitly sexual scenes, frequent hard-core language and episodes of violence and rough treatment of women. Not suitable for young teens.

‘Baby Boy’

Tyrese Gibson: Jody

Omar Gooding: Sweetpea

A.J. Johnson: Juanita

Taraji P. Henson: Yvette

Snoop Dogg: Rodney

Tamara LaSeon Bass: Peanut

Ving Rhames: Melvin

A New Deal production, released by Columbia Pictures. Director John Singleton. Producer John Singleton. Executive producer Dwight Williams. Screenplay John Singleton. Cinematographer Charles E. Mills. Editor Bruce Cannon. Costumes Ruth Carter. Music David Arnold. Production design Keith Brian Burns. Set decorator Judi Giovanni. Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes.

In general release.