Give Me Back My Daughter (Swirl Films, Tiny Riot Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 6) my husband Charles and I watched one of the most remarkable movies I’ve seen recently on Lifetime: Give Me Back My Daughter, written by Xavier Burgin and directed quite effectively by Kelley Kali. It’s about a heavy-set middle-aged African-American woman named Renée Johnson (Gabourey Sidibe), a widow who’s raising her daughter Imani (Cadence Reese) as a single parent following the death of her husband/Imani’s father (whom we see only as a dim image in old photos). She works as a bookkeeper in an office, and she’s hoping for a promotion – only she gets laid off instead, which quickly unravels her life. Renée ends up evicted after three months of unemployment, and she and Imani are reduced literally to living in Renée’s car and fearing being rousted (or worse) by the police in Houston, Texas, where this story takes place. Renée’s application for public assistance is denied because she no longer has a physical address – when the letter the welfare department sends her is returned with a “Not at This Address” message, her application is automatically canceled – and she sees a white woman breeze into the same office and get emergency assistance, but Renée is told that this program is only open to disabled people. “She doesn’t look disabled to me,” Renée snaps back. One of her job interviews is with a supercilious young idiot (Christian Adam) who insists she doesn’t have the right “vibes” for his office; we’re left to wonder if his real problem with Renée is because she’s a woman, she’s Black, she’s fat, or all of the above.

Through much of the first half of the movie Xavier Burgin (who’s also listed as “co-executive producer,” while Kelley Kali is listed as “producer”) seems to be channeling Franz Kafka in the tortures she puts Our Heroine through and the levels of bureaucratic insanity she confronts merely trying to support herself and her daughter with food and shelter. At one point she’s trying to bathe her daughter in a women’s restroom and get the “funk” out of her underarms. There’s also a chilling scene in which Renée and Imani are sleeping in Renée’s car when they’re confronted by a well-off suburban couple who demands that they move. The woman (Chloe Kiefer) is so adamant about it Renée snaps, “Who elected you mayor of this block?” The woman says she’s actually on the homeowners’ committee for the neighborhood, and threatens to call the police on Renée and Imani. In what becomes the last turn of the screw on Renée, she finally lands a job interview and actually gets offered the job, but because the woman who was supposed to baby-sit Imani during her interview flaked out and wasn’t in when they stopped by, Renée left Imani in her car and left it parked in front of the office where she was being interviewed. A woman spotted Imani alone in a parked car and called the police, and by the time Renée got out of her job interview the cops have already responded, taken Imani into custody, and when Renée returns she’s arrested and charged with child endangerment. Imani is sent into the foster-care system, which particularly bothers Renée because she and her late husband had both spent time in foster care during their childhoods, and they had sworn they would never let that happen to their daughter. Indeed, we later learn that Renée ran away from her last foster placement when her foster father either successfully molested her or at least tried to.

McCullough (Brian Kurlander), the judge assigned to Renée’s case, takes Imani away from her and assigns her to a foster home run by a white couple named Patterson (the actor playing Mr. Patterson isn’t listed on imdb.com but Mrs. Patterson is played by Susan Gallagher) who are already fostering 10 other kids – but none of them are Black and they don’t have any idea how to take care of Imani’s hair. This is a particularly sore point with Renée because she’d once wanted to become a beautician herself, specializing in Black women, and she even got a cosmetology license (albeit in another state, so it doesn’t transfer to Texas), only her marriage and later her husband’s illness sidetracked her and led her to office work and taking care of Imani. After a pretty unrelenting first hour and 10 minutes of misery, things finally start lightening up for Renée when she talks her way into a job at Jeff’s Diner, an independent hamburger joint where she used to take Imani. The place is owned by Jeff (Sean Anthony Baker) and his sole other staff member is his son, aspiring rapper Curtis (Myles Truitt). He’s advertising for another worker and Renée pleads with him for the job, which he reluctantly gives her after saying she’s overqualified. This is significant because among the conditions Judge McCullough laid down for Imani’s return to Renée is that she find steady employment and a place to live, as well as attend 80 hours’ worth of “parenting classes” – which in practice turn out to be a sort of support group for people who’ve lost their children due to poverty, racism (one woman in the group notes that white parents get much more compassionate treatment from “the system” than Black ones, and she’s shut down for not showing enough “personal responsibility” and blaming her predicament on racism instead), or both.

Fortunately, in the group she meets a beautician named Halima (Jade Fernandez), who works in a salon owned by her mother Tiana (Charmin Lee), and Halima helps Renée get a “booth rental” (one of the most preposterous sorts of employment on earth: you’re a sort of independent contractor on one chair of the salon, and you get to keep 60 percent of what you earn while the salon owner gets 40 percent, essentially the sharecropper principle applied to beauty work) at her mom’s salon after Renée demonstrates her “right stuff” by finishing setting a customer (Lakisha M. Thomas) whose previous beautician left her hair half-finished. Renée handles a troublesome customer at Jeff’s Diner – she ordered a hamburger without cheese, got one with cheese (a problem I’ve had as well and could readily identify with!), ate most of it but then demanded a refund. Curtis angrily refused but Renée offered to serve her a replacement cheese-free hamburger on the house. Renée also mediates a conflict between Jeff and his son Curtis over his rapper aspirations and his liberal use of the “F”-word in his raps; she gets Curtis to read a compassionate and obscenity-free poem he wrote about his dad to his dad. Jeff also has a contact with a Black landlord who has an apartment available, and the landlord is willing to take a chance on renting to Renée after Jeff vouches for her even though she doesn’t earn three times the rent money (a rule of thumb in the realty business that’s kept a lot of people, including some I know personally, homeless).

Alas, writer Burgin isn’t finished with putting Renée through Kafka-esque trials; just as things are finally looking up for her, her car (ya remember her car?) is stripped by a street gang, who take her battery (so the car is undrivable until Jeff gets it fixed for her) and also all her belongings, including the notebook of Imani’s drawings the foster parents gave Renée. Ultimately, despite Renée’s concern that Imani is bonding with her foster parents and won’t want to come home to her, she goes before the same judge that took Imani away and he goes into a long, elaborate spiel about how he’s concerned that Imani needs “stability” in her life before he reluctantly awards custody back to Renée, warning her that if she loses her jobs (plural) or her home, or her life derails again, he’ll take Imani away from her and put her back in foster care. Though there were some problems with the script (the whole gimmick of Renée getting arrested just after she’s been offered the sort of job she was working before smacks too much of coincidence-mongering to me, and I also could have done without the intimation of a romantic interest between the widow Renée and the widower Jeff at the end), overall Give Me Back My Daughter is a chillingly effective bit of Lifetime melodrama. It’s not billed as being based on a true story, but I can readily believe it – and with Donald Trump’s deliberate crashing of the American economy with his insane trade war against the rest of the world in general and our historic allies like Canada in particular, we can expect thousands – or even millions – of Americans to end up in the same predicament as Renée Johnson in this movie, losing absolutely everything utterly through no fault of their own and facing the grim task of mobilizing their energies to get back up again.