Juan (Mahershala Ali) and Chiron (Alex Hibbert) share a moment in Moonlight. (Photo courtesy of A24)Writer-director Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlight is beautiful in every aspect, from James Laxton’s lush cinematography to the achingly charismatic performances to the uncanny sharpness of Jenkins’ screenplay. It’s fitting that a film so concerned with the politics of attraction would be so attractive itself, and so rich with feeling and meaning.
The movie tells three stories one after the other, with each building on the last. In the first, a young boy (Alex Hibbert) finds surrogate parents in a kindly drug dealer (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend (Janelle Monae). In the second, a high schooler (Ashton Sanders) comes to grips with his homosexuality, only to have his heart ripped out. In the final act, a grown man (Trevante Rhodes) reconnects with an old soulmate (Andre Holland) as they reconcile the past and the present.
The protagonist in all three of these stories is the same person: Chiron, a meek but restless gradeschooler who grows older, harder, and wiser. It would be a spoiler to reveal how the stories connect. But no amount of description can spoil the grace with which the movie transitions from one to the next, or the quietly devastating way Jenkins slips significant story developments into the dialogue, like faded memories too painful to address in depth.
This movie’s concerns—the challenges of being black, being gay, and being both—rarely end up on the big screen. Jenkins bears that burden with ease. Every shot and story point drives home the idea that Chiron’s experience is a product of his environment and his skin color, from his family’s tenuous financial situation to the jovial childhood friend who calls him “Black” as a nickname and a reminder.
Chiron’s relationship with his mother Paula is the most painful manifestation of the reality he’s born into. She’s played with tenderness and ferocity by Naomie Harris, who reaches deep within to unearth addiction and emptiness in a woman so broken by her circumstances that she’s lost the ability to love her son. When Chiron seeks parental affection elsewhere, he’s rewarded with love but rarely with true understanding.
Even when he finds a way to understand himself, he’s no closer to reconciling his self-image with the world’s expectations. The movie uses its medium to observe Chiron’s perspective: the love in his heart brought to life by the dark purple sky, the torment in his soul reflected by pervasive loneliness.
It’s a testament to this movie’s nearly indescribable power that I kept expecting a catastrophic plot turn, something to remind me that, you know, it’s only a movie. Working from a story by playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jenkins never succumbs to narrative rules or thematic conventions. The intimate final act had me breathless, and then the movie ends, with neither a firm resolution nor a disappointing feint.
Moonlight is entrancing and important. It’s overflowing with cinematic pleasures: a gorgeously realized sequence in which Holland’s character whips up a Cuban diner dish; the visceral power of ocean waves; heartbreaking subtlety from all three of the movie’s Chirons. But its impact transcends the superficial. Like the ocean itself, Moonlight holds passion, and even hope, within its depths.
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Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
Written by Barry Jenkins from a story by Tarell Alvin McCraney
With Trevante Rhodes, Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris
Rated R for some sexuality, drug use, brief violence and language.
110 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema, Regal Majestic, and Arclight Bethesda
