Moonlight review

Now that awards season is in full swing, attention has been turned to Barry Jenkin’s second feature “Moonlight,” an archetypically American tale about the cross sections between poverty and identity. While embracing an exciting and vivid style of its own, the film is stripped bare, minimal and noticeably low-budget. Even still, Jenkins carefully puts every dollar on the screen, directing with his feelers fully extended to capture every meaningful moment with his actor’s vulnerable and honest performances.

This story focuses on three time periods in the life of a struggling African American boy named Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) who has to constantly dodge the neighborhood bullies for being too quiet and sensitive. Making things even more difficult, he discovers his mother (Naomi Harris) is using crack and bringing home strange men to access it. He then finds refuge in the unlikely parental figures of a local Florida drug dealer named Juan and his right-hand-woman Teresa (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monae).

We meet our protagonist again as a teenager (Ashton Sanders) when he’s forced to confront his inner conflicts with his only friend and confidante Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) after their school-yard relationship reaches a new level of emotional possibilities. Towards the last third of the film we drop in one last time with Kevin and Chiron as adults (Trevante Rhodes and Andre Holland), reconnecting after years have passed and their lives have taken them down widely diverging roads.

Through these stories are connected by a single timeline, each third works well on its own as an individual short, which makes a lot of sense given Jenkins many years working in the short-film format. What he accomplishes in this structure is something like Richard Linklater’s growing-up opus “Boyhood.” The audience is forced to look at these three moments in the changing life of Chiron and fill in the blanks between the juxtaposing segments. This successfully creates a larger world than the movie has the budget or time to accomplish on its own, giving the film both an overarching timelessness and the individual spirit of cultural specificity.

What makes the film live and breathe is the cast who works hard to be as natural and as delicate as possible. Because the movie is exploring themes of repression and the defensive masculinity that queer people in tough urban environments must front in order to survive, the actors play their parts very close to their chests, avoiding melodramatic Oscar-clipping as much as possible. The whole cast puts their trust in Jenkins sensitive direction to use their every hesitated breath and every raised eyebrow to inform the emotional realities that’s often deliberately left out of the dialogue. Naomi Harris as the dysfunctional mother is probably the broadest character and most literal performance given. Compared to the quiet intensity expressed by the rest of the cast, her portrayal is much less nuanced and the lines she delivers often mirrors her emotions exactly. Harris is faithfully playing the role as written, but it looks rather reductive compared to the subtly sublime work by the three actors who play her son.

This might not be your personal growing-up story but the raw emotions expressed in “Moonlight” are universal. While the ending comes to a disappointing halt just as the movie’s momentum is peaking and there’s nothing particularly new in the storytelling-- the plot touches on many tropes in both the coming-of-age and coming-out genres—the finely tuned performances and Jenkin’s filmic execution feels personal and authentic, even as he employs familiar narrative techniques.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2016