← ALL FRESH TAKES
SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW
01
THEMATIC CENTER
coming of age02
NARRATIVE PRESSURE
creation03
FORM
comedy04
RECORD ANCHORS
caught · comedian · homeboysThe record for The Come Up yields three coordinates specific to its premise—caught, comedian, and homeboys. That vocabulary places coming of age at the center and gives creation its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.
The Come Up brings coming of age into contact with creation through comedy. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A lively, generous comedy whose sharp timing and joy in performance deserve a big-screen audience.
The Come Up (2017) arrives with the coordinates of a comédie film situated in 2010s cinema. The record credits Robert L. Parker III with the direction and places Marcus Tolbert and Ronrico Albright in the foreground. With a broad feature-length canvas, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.
Read as comedy, the film carries the pressure of creation. Growing up appears less as a single threshold than as a series of renunciations, experiments, and borrowed stories before finding one's own measure. The most precise critical test is therefore the human cost of the creative act beyond its result. A comic film is more than the immediate efficiency of a line. Its real architecture may live in reactions, silences, and the slight change in a relationship after the laugh has passed.
The counterpoint asks what the adult must unlearn, rather than only what the young character still needs to acquire. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of coming of age, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The shift is to follow a scene after its punchline: that is often where the film reveals its real idea of the group.
THE VERDICT, REFRAMED
The wager: read comic timing as a form of social truth. Here, coming of age changes meaning under the pressure of creation.
THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT
The Come Up is about a young comedian as a young man who struggles to try to make it but the terrible streets kind of get him caught up. He's got a few homeboys that he hangs with that try to get him to do all the wrong things with them but he tries his best not to engage with the activities that's surrounding him. He get caught on the street doing a lil drugs at one time, get caught up in a robbery with his homeboys, get caught stealing and his momma puts him out the house. But he's got this girl on his side that keeps in straight and in order. And this is how he makes it. Meanwhile he's doing comedy shows at the clubs and people are laughing at him and not his jokes. He finally makes it as a comedian one day.
Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.- Year
- 2017
- Runtime
- 143 min
- Direction
- Robert L. Parker III
- Performers
- Marcus Tolbert · Ronrico Albright · Everett Anderson · A. Michelle Harleston · Robert L. Parker III · Kennedi Nicole Johnson · Daniel Murrell · Robert Parker IV