Twenty-year-old ex-con Jody (Tyrese Gibson) doesn’t look comfortable floating in utero in the opening image of John Singleton’s Baby Boy, but who can blame him for wanting to stay? He’s got two kids of his own by two different women, neither of whom he lives with. Instead he lives with his own mother, foxy 36-year-old Juanita (A.J. Johnson), who has taken up with pumped-up Melvin (Ving Rhames), an " O.G. " ( " old gangster " ) and every baby boy’s worst nightmare. Meanwhile, Jody’s erratic pal Sweetpea (Omar Gooding) offers gangbanging as an alternative, and his " baby mama " of choice, Yvette (Taraji P. Henson), complains about having to mind the kid while Jody borrows her car to go screw other women.

His life’s a mess, and the movie is a bit of one too, cluttered and claustrophobic but shot through with moments of eloquence and hilarity — many provided by Rhames in his best performance. Singleton has returned to the passion and assurance of Boyz N the Hood, and some sequences (a love montage with Jody going down on Yvette that embraces an entire tragic life; the simple cut from a confrontation to a goofy bike ride that summarizes the film) are breathtaking in their boldness. Boy succumbs to some immaturity of its own in the end with its shoot-out ego-versus-id ending, and any film that has Rhames spouting off on Oedipal complexes is begging too hard for a Freudian interpretation. Nonetheless, after the indulgence of Shaft, Singleton reclaims his role as the black conscience in mainstream film