Everybody loves Marcus. The beset, taciturn and occasionally noble hustler played by 50 Cent (known to his mother as Curtis Jackson) in Get Rich or Die Tryin', Marcus solicits declarations of affection from everyone around him, from relatives to homeboys to would-be killers.

Certainly, Get Rich wants you to love him too. Full of earnest conversations about how important it is to express yourself even (or especially) when you're oppressed by poverty, violence and lack of options, it frames Marcus repeatedly in those evocative filtered-light frames favored by director Jim Sheridan (In America, My Left Foot) and DP Declan Quinn, so he appears in sunlit halos. Such visual softening underlines Marcus' fundamental decency and devotion to his mother, feisty, hoop-earringed dealer Katrina (Serena Reeder), killed when the boy is only 8 years old. (He's played as a child by the affecting Marc John Jeffries.) When she's burned to death by a rival dealer, little Marcus hunkers down in a corner in his grandparents' home, determined to hide his emotions from then on.

It falls to others to do the talking. Prominent among his devotees are his grandma (Viola Davis), his slightly more skeptical grandpa (Sullivan Walker), and his first, and apparently only love, Charlene (child Rhyon Nicole Brown, grownup Joy Bryant). Sent away as a child by a stepfather who hears too much physical inclination in young Marcus' lyrics ("If you're my best friend/ I want you around all the time"), Charlene returns to their Jamaica, Queens, neighborhood as a dance teacher who, she admits, adorably, has "been thinking about that song for 10 years." Though Marcus mentions her "career" when she tells him she's pregnant with his child, you never see her dance or teach, only gaze on Marcus, encourage his art, and forgive his frankly egregious trespasses.

These trespasses form the bulk of the film's action, of course, as it is primarily a homosocial romance and redemption story. It opens with Marcus' shooting -- paralleling 50's famous "nine times" -- by a hooded associate, who does, in his way, love him. As he lies broken in the street, Marcus' voiceover takes you back to his youth, his mom's mighty efforts to supply him with new sneakers, and his own efforts to protect her; observing her in a turf scuffle with the "Rick James-looking motherfucker" Slim (Leon), the boy approaches with a steering wheel club, ready to fight. Sad and guilty about her death, Marcus also seeks to know his father, noting early on, "Everyone was in love with my mom, so anyone could be my dad." Except, he adds, a white man or a cop.

This search leads him to a series of relationships with men who repeatedly assert their love for him, including head gangster guy Levar (played by Bill Duke, who introduces himself as "God, Allah and Buddha, all rolled up into one big nigger"), the brutal Majestic (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, revisiting and revising Oz's Adebisi), and most notably, Marcus' very vocal cellmate Bama (Terrence Howard). "I fuckin' love you man, I'd do anything for you," Bama says during a robbery, when he almost kills a young boy because, he explains, "That's what I do, I kill motherfuckers, you know that!" Marcus does know that, as a later flashback to their first meeting in a prison shower demonstrates. When Marcus is assaulted by a shank-wielding naked inmate, Bama jumps right into the melee, such that five or six naked, hard-bodied men are soon slipping and sliding in water and soap and blood, all leading to a remarkable shot of Bama and Marcus laid on the shower floor, handcuffed, bleeding and introducing themselves: "You saved my life. Why?" As Bama eventually reveals, it was love at first sight.

Bama's offer to be his manager boosts Marcus' own decision to leave the street and dedicate himself to rapping; when someone slips a razor blade into his cell so he can kill himself, Marcus starts carving lyrics into his wall. (50's only full-on rap performance, as Marcus' alter ego Young Caesar, comes under the film's closing credits.) The partners' release from prison leads directly to a collision with Majestic, who feels possessive toward Marcus, wanting his "hardest working" dealer to help in their ongoing turf wars with "the Colombians" (utterly stereotypical here).

The collision inspires Get Rich's most hysterical love, as Majestic, more than a little invested in maintaining Marcus' loyalty, assaults one associate with a machete (which he apparently keeps in his apartment for just such raging occasions) and later incites Marcus' attack, taunting him and then gurgling, post beatdown, "I love you, man." Of course.