Did I ever imagine, during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I’d live long enough to see a movie like “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s brilliant, achingly alive new work about black queerness? Did any gay man who came of age, as I did, in the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and AIDS, think he’d survive to see a version of his life told onscreen with such knowledge, unpredictability, and grace? Based on a story by the gay black playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney—Jenkins himself is not gay—the film is virtuosic in part because of Jenkins’s eye and in part because of the tale it tells, which begins in nineteen-eighties Miami.
Four white Miami-Dade police officers have beaten a young black man to death and been acquitted of manslaughter, setting off riots in the city’s black enclaves—Liberty City, Overtown, and elsewhere. It’s hard for a man of color walking those sun-bleached streets not to watch his back or feel that his days are numbered. That’s how Juan (the beautiful Mahershala Ali) carries himself—defensively, warily. He’s a dope dealer, so there’s that, too. He may be a boss on the streets—his black do-rag is his crown—but he’s intelligent enough to know that he’s expendable, that real power doesn’t belong to men like him. Crack is spreading through the city like a fever. Stepping out of his car, Juan asks a cranky drug runner what’s up. (Jenkins and his ardent cinematographer, James Laxton, film the car as if it were a kind of enclosed throne.) Juan, his mouth fixed in a pout—sometimes he sucks on his tongue, as if it were a pacifier—doesn’t take his eyes off the street. He can’t afford to; this situation, any situation, could be changed in an instant by a gun or a knife.
In this world, which is framed by the violence to come—because it will come—Juan sees a skinny kid running, his backpack flapping behind him. He’s being pursued by a group of boys, and he ducks into a condemned building to escape. Juan follows, entering through a blasted-out window, a symbol, perhaps, of the ruin left by the riots. Inside, in a dark, silent space, the kid stares at Juan, and Juan stares at the kid. There’s a kind of mirroring going on. Maybe Juan is looking at his past while the boy looks up at a future he didn’t know he could have. It’s a disorienting scene, not so much because of what happens as because of what doesn’t happen. Throughout the movie, Jenkins avoids what I call Negro hyperbole—the overblown clichés that are so often used to represent black American life. For instance, Juan doesn’t take that runaway kid under his wing in order to pimp him out and turn him into a drug runner; instead, he brings him home to feed him, nourish him.
Juan lives in a small, unassuming house with his soft-spoken but confident partner, Teresa (played by the singer Janelle Monáe). The couple look on as the kid eats and eats; it’s clear, though, that he’s hungry for more than food. The boy doesn’t even say his name, Chiron, until Juan nudges him: “You don’t talk much but you damn sure can eat.” The affectionate scolding makes Chiron (Alex Hibbert, a first-time actor, who couldn’t be better) sit up and take notice; it tells him that he counts. And he knows he counts even more when Juan calls him by his nickname—Little—as a way of claiming him.
“Faggot” is another name, and it’s one that Chiron hears often as he grows up. He’s an outsider at school, and at home, too. He lives in public housing with his single mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), who goes on drug binges, less to alleviate her sadness than to express her wrath—against the world and, especially, against her son, who she thinks keeps her from the world. Chiron lives for the moments when he can get away from his mother’s countless recriminations and needs, and swim in the unfamiliar waters of love with Juan and Teresa. One indelible scene shows Juan holding Chiron in his arms in a rippling blue ocean, teaching him to float—which is another way of teaching him the letting go that comes with trust, with love.
But, at the end of every outing, Teresa and Juan show their respect by returning Chiron home. No matter how awful Paula is, she is still Chiron’s mother. This gesture is one of many that Jenkins, who, like McCraney, was raised in Liberty City, understands from the inside out. Growing up in this community, Juan and Paula were taught to care for children, their own and others’. (There are no white characters in the film, and this is a radical move on Jenkins’s part. Whites would have introduced a different dynamic to “Moonlight.” Jenkins’s story is about a self-governing black society, no matter how fractured.) But drugs have made a mess of family, or the idea of family, and Paula gets in Juan’s face when he tries to stop her from using. She has a child, sure, but how can he talk when he’s the one selling drugs? It’s a vicious cycle, in which the characters are oppressed by everything but hope. Still, Juan does hope, if only for Chiron. That he is able to pluck that feeling out of the darkness of those Miami nights makes him a classically heroic figure: he knows his limitations, he knows that life is tragic, but he is still willing to dream.
About thirty minutes into the film, Chiron, sitting at Juan and Teresa’s orderly table, asks what a faggot is. At the screening I attended, the entire audience froze, as did the figures onscreen. Then Chiron asks if he himself is a faggot. There’s no music in this scene; no one cries; Juan doesn’t grab a gun and try to blow the slandering universe away. Instead, he takes the word apart, and doesn’t take Chiron apart with it. He knows that Chiron is marked for misery, and how will Juan’s heart bear it, let alone Chiron’s?
“Moonlight” undoes our expectations as viewers, and as human beings, too. As we watch, another movie plays in our minds, real-life footage of the many forms of damage done to black men, which can sometimes lead them to turn that hateful madness on their own kind, passing on the poison that was their inheritance. As Juan squires his fatherless friend about, we can’t help thinking, Will he abuse him? Will it happen now? Jenkins keeps the fear but not the melodrama in his film. He builds his scenes slowly, without trite dialogue or explosions. He respects our intelligence enough to let us just sit still and watch the glorious faces of his characters as they move through time. Scene follows scene with the kind of purposefulness you find in fairy tales, or in those Dickens novels about boys made and unmade by fate.
Jenkins has influences—I would guess that Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Terrence Malick, and Charles Burnett are high on the list, along with Michael Roemer’s 1964 film “Nothing But a Man,” one of the first modern black love stories to avoid buffoonery and improbability—but what really gets him going here is filmmaking itself, and the story he’s telling. Directors such as Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien explored gay black masculinity in the nineties, but they did so in essay-films, which allowed the audience a kind of built-in distance. Of course, no one in the nineties wanted to finance films about gay black men. Twenty years later, I still don’t know how Jenkins got this flick made. But he did. And it changes everything.
The film is divided into three parts, titled “Little,” “Chiron,” and “Black.” In the second part, Chiron (played now by Ashton Sanders) is a teen-ager, thin and walking with the push, resolve, and loneliness of a character for whom Billie Holiday would have given her all in a song. Like any young person, Chiron wants to be claimed bodily but is not entirely in his body. He’s growing up without much reinforcement outside Juan and Teresa’s home. Paula’s drug addiction has escalated and so has her anger. She’s a rotten baby, flailing around, as full of bile as Terrel (Patrick DeCile, in an incredible characterization), who bullies Chiron at school. So when a classmate, Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), shows Chiron something other than hostility, it feels like a kind of fantasy. Indeed, after Kevin jokes with Chiron about a girl, he dreams about Kevin having sex with her. And it’s like a dream one night when Chiron, trusting little but wanting to trust more, approaches Kevin at the beach where Juan taught him to swim.
The light-skinned Kevin has nicknamed Chiron Black, and he asks why, wondering if it’s a put-down. Kevin, who is more comfortable in his own body, says that it’s because Chiron is black; to him, it’s not an insult. This moment of confusion—about internalized self-hatred and the affection of naming—is unlike anything that’s been put onscreen before; it shows what freedom and pain can look like, all in one frame. When the boys kiss, Chiron apologizes for it, and we wince, because who among us hasn’t wanted to apologize for his presence? Intimacy makes the world, the body, feel strange. How does it make a boy who’s been rejected because of his skin color, his sexual interests, and his sensitivity feel? Kevin says, “What have you got to be sorry for?” As he works his hand down Chiron’s shorts, the camera pulls back; this is the only moment of physical intimacy in the film, and Jenkins knows that in this study of black male closeness the point isn’t to show fucking; it’s to show the stops and starts, the hesitation, and the rush that comes when one black male body finds pleasure and something like liberation in another.
Watching Sanders play Chiron at this stage of his life is rather like seeing Montgomery Clift act for the first time, or Gloria Foster in “Nothing But a Man.” There’s no accounting for talent like this. Sanders has a conjurer’s gifts, and an intuitive understanding of how the camera works—how it can push into an actor’s face and consciousness, and how the actor can push back against the intrusion by inhabiting the reality of the moment.
But the moment of love doesn’t last. When Terrel challenges Kevin about his attachment to Chiron, Kevin beats Chiron up, and then Terrel jumps on him, too. It’s “The Lord of the Flies” all over again: whale on sensitivity before it can get to you. In a bid to protect his dream of love, Chiron shows up at school one day and, wordlessly, breaks a chair over Terrel’s back. It’s every queer kid’s revenge fantasy, but what follows is every queer kid’s reality: fight back, and you’ll pay for it; the power does not belong to you.
In the third part of the film, Chiron (gorgeously played by Trevante Rhodes) is an adult, but still looking after his mother. She’s in rehab in Atlanta, and he has fulfilled his destiny by example: like Juan, he’s a drug dealer in a do-rag. But he doesn’t have a Teresa, doesn’t have anyone. He wears his sensitivity like a shroud around his now muscular body, which looks very black in the moonlight as he lies in bed, startled to have received a phone call from Kevin after many years. Rhodes’s portrayal of the grownup Chiron feels like a natural evolution from the earlier performances. The gold fronts that his Chiron wears are just another form of armor against longing, in a mouth that yearns to taste Kevin’s once again, to relive that forbidden love, for which black men sometimes punish one another. Rarely has the world taught them not to. But at times, when no one’s looking, love happens, just the same. ♦
