Not even Chiron is oblivious to this irony. Alongside his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe), Juan becomes a parental surrogate, since Chiron’s mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), has fallen into addiction. There he’s found by Juan (Mahershala Ali, superb), a drug dealer sympathetic enough to realize the boy, who refuses to speak or make eye contact, needs a meal and place to stay. Hibbert) who, nicknamed “Little” by his classmates, runs from bullies and hides in a nearby crack den. More than a capacity to learn a broad social lesson, Jenkins’ audience must have patience to learn about Chiron, a tenderly shy person who lives in his own head and feels uncomfortable in his own skin.īroken into three distinct chapters, Moonlight opens with Chiron as a 9-year-old (Alex R. Jenkins captures Chiron in his entirety, telling the story of a whole individual and forming Moonlight into a social reflector that resists an easy summary. Both Jenkins and McCraney grew up in the film’s setting, the Liberty City housing projects in Florida, and their shared experience informs the film before us. Regardless of how society labels an individual, people evolve and continuously oppose classification in the nuanced details of their lives. The graceful filmmaking on display surpasses the writer-director’s last film, his freshman effort Medicine for Melancholy back in 2008, while the deeply compassionate story leaves behind any thought of clichés or stereotypes in favor of something artful and fundamentally human.Ĭinema often tries to summarize the “African American experience” or “gay experience” into a single film, but Jenkins considers such matters of identity far too intricate to reduce down to a handful of broad tropes. Jenkins’ approach rolls in mesmerizingly poetic narrative waves and rich formal beauty, the effect delivered in measured scenes of painful experience. Based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jenkins assembles a life throughout three vignettes, three places in time, and three actors playing Chiron over the course of about fifteen years. To describe its protagonist, Chiron, by those labels would be reductive, however, as his character defies categorization, just as the film does. Barry Jenkins’ luminous and delicate Moonlight tells an expansive, intimate story about growing up poor, Black, and gay.
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