Black masculinity and rites of passage the focus of “Rites.”

Bottom line: In fits and starts, a group show examines the difficult passage for black men, from boyhood to manhood.

The premise of the group exhibition “Rites” at the Zuckerman Museum of Art is that adulthood can be a harrowing thing, especially when it’s thrust too early upon some by virtue of their skin color.

Much has been made about the difficulty girls face transitioning to womanhood, but an equally compelling case can be made for boys on their path to becoming men.

That difficulty is exacerbated in a culture where little boys playing with toy guns and teenage boys walking home from the store are treated as potential threats. It’s almost impossible to see “Rites” and not reflect on our own culture. But it would have been nice to see more work — and more powerful commentary — on the difficult circumstance of coming of age.

The show’s curator, Atlanta-based artist Fahamu Pecou, has often centered his own artwork on black masculinity. Though in his early work Pecou adopted the persona of a preening hip hop star, more recent work — perhaps informed by grim current events — has become more reflective and somber. Concerned with the “rites of passage” undergone by black men, Pecou writes in wall text accompanying the exhibition: “For some, tradition dictates what this process will look like. For others, manhood is thrust upon them before they are ready.”

“Rites” strongest pieces are two videos from French artist Alexis Peskine and poet Jon Goode. In Peskine’s mesmerizing video work “Aljana Moons” the artist uses elements of science fiction and documentary to show men and boys in a Senegalese village going through mysterious rites of passage.

Set to an eerie electronic music score, some of the boys and men don a kind of futuristic, Mad Max-style armor, crafted of tin cans and industrial bags of rice. Those uniforms cribbed together from trash suggest young men girding themselves for some unseen battle, donning the materials available to them.

It’s a sci-fi opening to a video that transforms into a documentary. Male villagers, wielding clubs and knives, lead young boys through some rite of passage with suggestions of violence and assault. There are razor blades, men with machetes and a sense of battle preparations underway. “Aljana Moons” suggests a ritualized, theatrical form of violence, very different from the violence some young black men face in this country.

Jon Goode’s video, “Room With a View,” features a bright blue sky observed through a windowpane, initially offering a vision of joyful possibility. In the endlessly looping audio track, the narrator recounts his mother’s habit of buying his clothes too big, so he’d grow into them. As the narrative continues, that youthful promise morphs into sadness, drugs and a stint in juvenile detention. Though nothing changes in the video, that windowpane suggestively transforms into jail bars and the blue sky becomes more mirage than a beacon of hope.

In his more successful of two works on display, Cosmo Whyte creates a memorable large-scale drawing, “Sweet, sweet, Back,” in which a circle of young male dancers perform back bends and gestures that fluctuate between celebratory and disturbing. Their movements can be construed as dancing or reeling from some attack, an ambiguity that is seen throughout “Rites.” Whyte breaks up the surface of his drawings in a way that suggests a fractured consciousness.

That same sense of beleaguered identity comes through in Robert Hodge’s layers of reclaimed paper in which the faces of men emerge from the eroded surface, as if engaged in a willful struggle for self hood.