Moon­light

Unspo­ken, unspeak­able inti­ma­cy is the dom­i­nant mode of Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ Moon­light, a personal/​political trip­tych which offers keen per­spec­tives on mas­culin­i­ty, queer sex­u­al­i­ty, racial iden­ti­ty, and the odd angles at which they intersect.

In adapt­ing the sto­ry of a closed-off boy trem­bling before love (first unrecog­nis­able, then unre­quit­ed) from the play ​‘In Moon­light Black Boys Look Blue’, Jenk­ins presents his trea­tise on the many tri­als of black life in Amer­i­ca. At once an aching romance wor­thy of com­par­i­son to Wong Kar-wai’s best and a vital glimpse into a cul­tur­al milieu his­tor­i­cal­ly under­served by the cin­e­ma, Moon­light pries open the viewer’s eyes as it curb-stomps their heart. That, and it fea­tures the sin­gle most poignant hand job in the his­to­ry of the artform.

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In a cli­mate as social­ly rigid as urbanised Mia­mi, which Jenk­ins realis­es with care and exhaus­tive atten­tion to detail, to devi­ate from the norm is to invite harass­ment. A gay kid is a dif­fi­cult thing to be in an aggres­sive­ly straight neigh­bour­hood such as this, a les­son young Chi­ron learns the hard way, again and again. Through­out his boy­hood, ado­les­cence and young adult­hood — respec­tive­ly por­trayed by Alex Hib­bert, Ash­ton Sanders and Tre­vante Rhodes, three actors seem­ing­ly work­ing from a sin­gle mind — he fig­ures out how to make his way through a world that doesn’t know what do with him by keep­ing his mouth shut.

Silence pro­tects him as a boy, already ostracised due to his diminu­tive stature. Stay­ing qui­et most­ly keeps him out of harm’s way, whether from school­yard teas­ing or more trou­bling aggres­sions from his moth­er (Naomie Har­ris), who’s tak­en a lik­ing to crack cocaine. In his sullen teen years, his tac­it stare is a mul­ti-pur­pose response to the bul­lies tor­ment­ing him, fear and despair and steely resolve all in one. By the time we rejoin him as an adult, his long paus­es in con­ver­sa­tion con­ceal a novel’s worth of sup­pressed feeling.

An assort­ment of men, both in pla­ton­ic and roman­tic capac­i­ties, shape his life. A neigh­bour­hood deal­er, played by Maher­sha­la Ali as a mod­el of pater­nal warmth, pro­vides a father fig­ure for Chi­ron even as he destroys the boy’s moth­er. A high-school ene­my hard­ens him with con­stant beat­ings and dri­ves the good­heart­ed stu­dent to shock­ing extremes. A life­long crush takes Chi­ron from the ear­li­est ten­ta­tive exper­i­men­ta­tion through to his mirac­u­lous first sex­u­al expe­ri­ence. Each of them chal­lenge Chiron’s con­stant­ly shift­ing notion of what man­hood is or should be, push­ing him to tough­en up or hold fast to his soft­er nature With an autho­r­i­al gen­eros­i­ty so rare it bor­ders on rad­i­cal, Jenk­ins affords in nite empa­thy to all his creations.

He imbues the stock fig­ures native to fic­tion about pover­ty — the addict, the slinger, the inno­cent caught in the mid­dle — with fine­ly shad­ed human­i­ty, and car­ries that gen­tler approach to the shat­ter­ing romance that com­mands the final act. The con­clud­ing sen­ti­ment of com­pas­sion speaks to the film’s macro and micro-scaled ambi­tions: in their own hum­ble and imper­fect way, everyone’s just try­ing to carve out a life for themselves.