This Miami-Dade politician’s childhood is now a movie starring the former Lil’ Romeo

In a new movie called “The Reject,” a young Kionne McGhee overcomes a troubled childhood where almost everyone gave up on him except for an inspiring coach and a mother who believed in a boy who went on to serve as a prosecutor, Florida lawmaker and Miami-Dade County commissioner.

Filmed in a year in which the real-life McGhee was seeking reelection to his South Miami-Dade commission seat, the independent film brings celebrity to a story McGhee has written about in autobiographical books.

Romeo Miller, 35, previously known as the young rapper Lil’ Romeo, is a producer of the film and plays one of McGhee’s wrestling coaches at South Dade High in the 1990s. The plot revolves around McGhee’s dyslexia, which left other adults in his life branding him mentally incapable of a normal education or a productive adulthood.

“It’s a story of a kid who wasn’t supposed to make it but did make it,” said Marco Molinet, a producer of “The Reject” who is a childhood friend of McGhee from South Miami-Dade’s Naranja neighborhood and who runs after-school film programs and summer camps for Miami-Dade youth. “No matter how down you are, no matter how many problems you have, there is still an opportunity for light.”

A premiere screening at this weekend’s Urban Film Festival at Miami’s Lyric Theater is sold out. There are no plans yet for future screenings of “The Reject.”

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Molinet runs a nonprofit, Florida Film House International, that received $100,000 in county funds last fall from McGhee’s office.

Molinet said the nonprofit used the money to fund the youth programs that in the past have received financial support from Miami-Dade County and the city of Miami. He said a separate entity he runs, the for-profit Florida Film House, was the production house that helped turn “The Reject” into reality.

While Molinet said his for-profit company sometimes transfers money to support the nonprofit youth programs, dollars do not go in reverse, so Miami-Dade money was not used for “The Reject.”

“Our greatest investor in our not-for-profit is our for-profit,” he said.

In an interview Friday, McGhee declined to answer questions about the $100,000 grant. “Whatever you have, you have,” he told the Miami Herald.

The Herald requested the paperwork behind the grant allocation, but the County Commission office has not yet released it.

Public records show the nonprofit has received grants from the city of Miami and from Miami-Dade beyond the $100,000 that came out of a county fund assigned to each commission office to support local causes. Miami-Dade commissioners approved McGhee’s $100,000 grant request for Florida Film House International and more than a dozen other awardees at their Nov. 7 meeting last year.

Molinet declined to say how much “The Reject” cost to produce but described a shoestring budget that wrapped shooting only eight days after it started in April. “They were long days,” he said.

He said funding for the movie was arranged by Miller as the main producer. Molinet said he’s known Miller for years and that the rapper-turned-filmmaker supports his youth programs in Miami.

In 2019, Miller attended a Miami festival for young filmmakers and presented an award to a participant from Molinet’s program, Kamal Ani-Bello. Five years later, Molinet cast Ani-Bello to play a teenage McGhee in “The Reject.”

“He told Romeo: ‘I’m going to work with you one day,’” Molinet said.

Based on a three-minute preview reel, the dramatization includes at least one encounter McGhee had with police. Public records list a few criminal charges against McGhee when he was 19, including resisting arrest without violence.

As a commissioner, he recounted his time in jail — which McGhee said was brief as part of the booking process — in advocating for better conditions for inmates in Miami-Dade’s Corrections system.

In Friday’s interview, McGhee, 46, said the parts of the movie he’s seen capture the pain of his childhood and the trauma of living in poverty with the steady threat of violence in the neighborhood outside the public-housing complex where he lived.

The movie is based on his 2009 book “A Mer[e] I Can is American,” which retells stories about McGhee eating mayonnaise sandwiches when his mother couldn’t afford food from the wages she earned picking beans, as well as an instance when he saw a dead body in a parking lot before he turned 10. McGhee said he was a frequent brawler with fellow students and liked to get suspended so he wouldn’t have to deal with attending classes.

He credits his graduation to a teacher giving him last-minute extra credit, allowing him to inch his way toward an eventual law degree as he matured into a student better able to manage his dyslexia.

“By the time I made it to college, I started understanding how to control my trauma triggers,” he said Friday. “I just had to come to grips with it.”

McGhee, 46, has a cameo in the movie, as seen in “The Reject” trailer. When Ani-Bello is walking out of a clothing store, the real-life McGhee plays a customer who stops the young man.

“Nice tie,” he says as he straightens the signature red tie from the local 5000 Role Models mentorship program. “Let me fix that for you.”