Immediately after screening Barry Jenkins' remarkable, poetic coming-of-age drama Moonlight, I began worrying about how I might write about it without making this brooding film sound like any number of other stories about lost kids growing up on mean streets strewn with the glass and foil paraphernalia of American drug culture.
It is easy to say that Moonlight is about a sensitive boy who grows up to be a harder man. What is more difficult is to convey the heart-crushing pain and, ultimately, the abiding sense of hope it evokes.
So knowing how it will sound, let's start at a kitchen table, and an introverted and confused 10-year-old boy named Chiron (Alex Hibbert). He is not a carefree child, his existence seems provisional. The adults -- Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monae) -- who sit beside him are not his parents but surrogates. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Juan is a drug dealer who services Chiron's real mother's (Naomie Harris) burgeoning crack addiction. Nevertheless they are good to Chiron, and somehow they know precisely the right things to say when the boy finally speaks:
"Am I a faggot?"
No, no, he's not, they tell him. He may be gay, but he's not that. And at his age, he's got a little time to figure it all out.
It's hard to imagine that the scene, which plays softly, almost offhandedly, is not drawn from someone's life, and it's not surprising to learn that director Jenkins and writer Tarell McCraney -- whose autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue is the source material for the script -- come from the same suburban Miami streets as little Chiron. And that both of their mothers had problems with crack.
Chiron (now played by Ashton Sanders) grows into an angular, misfit teenager who learns terrible lessons about how to get through high school. Bullied and harassed, he maintains a single close friendship with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), a kid who seems preternaturally at ease in his skin. But Kevin, under pressure from his peers, betrays Chiron, leading to a spasm of violence.
In the third act, Chiron -- now called Black and played with deep empathy by Trevante Rhodes -- has transformed into a muscular crack capo obviously patterned on his father figure. Living in Atlanta, where he runs his own corners, this Chiron has done time, found his cool and carries the potential for murderous brutality. A decade after their last encounter, he looks up Kevin (now played by Andre Holland), then climbs into his vintage Chevy and points it back toward Miami to reconnect with his homie.
(On the car's CD player, Jidenna's 2015 jam "Classic Man," with the lyrics: I'm a classic man/You can be mean when you look this clean, I'm a classic man/Calling on me like a young OG, I'm a classic man.)
Informed by aching sexual tension and a palpable sense of waste, Moonlight is an elliptical and highly detailed study of sadness and resolve, about approach and rapprochement, a piece about how families dissolve and re-form, told more in bitter glances and fallen gazes than in words. (It's difficult to imagine how it might have played on stage, so minimal is the dialogue.) There's not a false performance or detail in it, and even the high school kids seem to be the right age.
It presents us with a different Miami from the one we've come to know in movies and television shows, a real and stark place where good intentions are fragile and scar tissue makes for body armor. It is a tough and beautiful film that one minute feels like Jean Genet transposed into the key of hard antiseptic sunshine before collapsing into a blue and lyrical Francois Truffautian night.
Maybe that seems strained, but it's the best I've got for this minor miracle. Just see it; you'll know what I mean.
MovieStyle on 12/02/2016