![]() ![]() The crashing of waves runs all through Moonlight, even in scenes that don't take place near the coast: it's in the persistent hiss of a gas stove or the low thrum of a refrigerator, a constant reminder of what he's trying to get back to, a state he's trying to reclaim. When Little is a child, Juan takes him into the Florida surf, an act of tenderness towards a boy we sense has known few of them, especially from men. But he's still tied to the past, and to Kevin, now played by André Holland. He's moved there to reinvent himself and to get his mother off drugs he knows how to hide who he is now. The boys flirt with each other, but it's not clear either knows what they're doing, or whether acknowledging it would break the spell.Īs an adult, Black, as he's now known, adopts the posture of a street tough: hip-hop is heard on the movie's soundtrack for the first time, bumping from his car as he drives down the streets of Atlanta, gold fronts glittering in his mouth. He finds himself dreaming of his friend, Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), who brags about having sex with girls in the school hallways. In the middle section, Chiron begins to come to terms with his sexuality, but at a price: his classmates' taunts have matured into full-fledged violence, and his mother (Naomie Harris) has effectively disappeared into a crack pipe. As the title of Tarell Alvin McCraney's source play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, observes, sometimes all it takes is a shift in the light to see the world anew. It's possible the screen has never seen a drug dealer like Juan, depicted in such matter-of-fact fashion, without menace or anxiety, but it never feels like Jenkins is out to prove a point he’s just depicting African-American life as the movies have seldom known it. Juan, a Cuban immigrant, seems to understand that as well, but he takes Little into his comfortably middle-class home, with an attentive wife (Janelle Monaé) and woven placemats on the table. In the first section, Little is befriended by a drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali), who finds Little holed up in an abandoned building, hiding from the taunts of other boys, who already suspect what Little himself cannot yet articulate: that he is gay. Jenkins doesn't bend over backwards making his three actors resemble one another, and their distinctiveness comes to feel like part of the point: a product of Chiron's attempts to change who he is. But as a child, growing up with no father and a mother who's beginning to lose her life to crack, he's known as “Little” as a hardened grown-up in Atlanta, he's simply called “Black”. His name is Chiron, pronounced with all the vowels long, so it starts with "shy". Jenkins splits his protagonist's story in three, using different actors to portray him as a child (Alex R Hibbert), a teenager (Ashton Sanders), and a young man (Trevante Rhodes). But while it would be better if Moonlight were Jenkins' fourth or fifth feature instead of his second, that time hasn't gone to waste: Moonlight is a vastly more confident and visionary film, the work of a major film-maker and not just a promising one. It's been eight years since Medicine for Melancholy, Jenkins' first and only previous feature, a gap all too illustrative of what awaits film-festival darlings who aren't young white men eager to make the next Jurassic Park.
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