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As an aspiring rapper, 16-year-old Bri is defined by her passion for music and focused on her “come up,” or success as a rapper. Her motivations to create a music career for herself are complex. On one level, she is a teenager who has witnessed injustice and trauma her entire life: her father’s murder, her mother’s drug addiction, her assault by the security guards, and the police shooting of an unarmed Black man in her neighborhood. Rap is a way for her to express the truth about the unjust world she sees and the pain she’s experienced, and to tell the story of her life on her own terms. On another level, Bri is driven to earn money in order to help her family rise out of poverty. These two motivations—the drive to speak the truth and the drive to make money through fame—conflict for Bri.
When her rap career starts to take off, her manager, Supreme, pushes her to perform the role of a stereotypical “hoodlum” and to make choices that go against her values. As she becomes more successful and enters the public eye, she finds herself behaving more and more like her hoodlum rap persona, getting into fights, losing her temper, and being aggressive towards her critics. She also gets into disagreements that drive wedges between her and the people closest to her, including Malik, Aunt Pooh, and Jay. As violence begins to encircle Bri, including a robbery at gunpoint by the same gang that killed her rap-legend father, Bri must decide what she truly wants. In a pivotal moment, Bri snubs a powerful record executive and the record contract he’s offering, choosing to tell her own story instead of being a white man’s puppet. In the end, Bri chooses to be herself and is rewarded by the possibility of success on her own terms.
