Moonlight, film review: A form of poetry, at once utterly specific and universal

Daftly, Moonlight was completely overlooked by the Baftas; it won’t be by the Oscars. It’s only the second feature from writer/director Barry Jenkins, 37 — his first, Medicine for Melancholy, an indie romcom about a one-night stand between a pair of twentysomethings, having been made on a budget of just $15,000 some eight years ago. That debut won one award, from the San Francisco Film Critics’ Circle, being set in that city. Moonlight, which has already won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Drama, is up for eight Oscars.

It is based on a short, never-produced, autobiographical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, which he wrote as a drama-school project at the start of his career. He has since found fame, winning the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award as early as 2008, and a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 2013, but perhaps this is his finest work.

McCraney, 36, and Jenkins came from the same rough Liberty City housing projects in Miami and attended the same junior and middle schools but had never met, McCraney being a year younger. Both had been affected by having severely drug-addicted mothers, Jenkins’s surviving being HIV-positive for 24 years, McCraney’s having succumbed to Aids.

McCraney is gay, Jenkins straight, but Jenkins says he saw himself in McCraney’s play “in every way — except for that one aspect of his identity”. It was fortunate that McCraney’s play had never been produced, Jenkins says, since “there was enough space that I could create something else”.

That he has done. Moonlight never feels like the film of a play in the way that, say, Fences does. (“No marriage of theatre and cinematography without both being exterminated” — Robert Bresson). It is pure, even exquisite cinema.

In some ways it’s a straightforward coming-of-age story in three acts, or chapters, showing us its main character, Chiron, at the age of 10, then 16, and then in his early thirties. Jenkins took the radical decision to cast three different actors: Miami local Alex Hibbert as the boy; Ashton Sanders, rake thin, with a remarkably still and inward presence, as the teenager; and Trevante Rhodes, an extremely powerfully built former sports star as the man.

They do not much resemble one another and Jenkins made sure they never met during filming so as not to influence each other, but so powerful is our identification with Chiron, and so challenged is his identity, that not only does this visual disjunction not matter, it works marvels for the film. At no point do you ever doubt that it is Chiron’s story you are seeing through these different actors and so you give it your faith.

Moonlight opens on the street, a tough-looking drug dealer, Juan (Mahershala Ali) drawing up in a big car and exchanging a few words with his sellers. Some children pass by, chasing a nervous boy, the camera shaking wildly as it runs with him, looking for safety in an abandoned flat, cowering and crying as his tormentors throw rubbish at him. The unexpectedly kindly Juan rescues him — “What you doing in here little man?” — and takes him home.

This is Little, the young Chiron, a boy so traumatised he hardly dare speak a word, traumatised both by his home life with his druggy mother (Naomie Harris, shockingly good in this role, when we’re more used to seeing her play strong women) and the stirrings of a gay identity that is suspected and rejected by his peers before he knows it himself. In a big-skied playing field scene, a friend, Kevin, tells him, “You always let people pick on you” and they tussle in a way that’s half a fight but almost an embrace.

In a spectacular beach scene, Juan teaches Little to swim — filmed from half below the waves, like a form of rebirth — and some life-lessons too: “At some point you’ve got to decide for yourself who you want to be — you can’t let somebody make that decision for you.”

Too good to be true? Mahershala Ali’s calm presence is such that it doesn’t seem so, even when Little asks him, “What’s a faggot?” and he replies correctly: “A faggot is ... a word used to make gay people feel bad.” But, still feeling his way into his own life, Little then asks Juan if he sells drugs and, when he admits he does, follows through with a painful inference: “My mother, she do drugs, right?”

In the second chapter Juan has gone and Chiron (Ashton Sanders), hunched and head down, is being bullied at school by his macho classmates and begged for money by his now bug-eyed and desperate mother. But in a visually stunning night scene, back on the beach with his friend Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), smoking a little dope, he almost opens up: “I cry so much sometimes, I feel like I’m gonna drown.” They embrace, Kevin affectionately giving Chiron a handjob, swiftly realising, “You ain’t never done nothing like that before, huh?” When they say goodnight we see Chiron smile for the first time. But the high-school horrors worsen and Chiron, until now so repressed, erupts into violence.

In the third act Chiron, now known as “Black” (Trevante Rhodes) has, after prison time, transformed himself into a version of Juan: massively muscled, sporting gold grillz and a do-rag, an intimidating, gun-toting drug dealer himself, in downtown Atlanta. He started over, he built himself from the ground up, built himself hard, he says. Now he looks the scary one.

Out of the blue, after years, he gets a call from Kevin (André Holland), now running his own diner back in Miami, and drives down to see him. In a moving final scene Chiron at last lets his defences down and admits how completely lacking in any intimacy his life has been. He is still that little boy, unloved, alone. “I’m me,” he says simply, “I ain’t trying to be nothing else.”

Moonlight has incredible flow, moving easily between these disparate events without ever seeming merely episodic, a sign of expert editing. It is sensually, mesmerically shot by cinematographer James Laxton, often coming from partial, surprising viewpoints, the camera moving with and around the characters, who sometimes look straight into it. The aesthetic is not naturalism but a lush heightening of experience into beauty.

Shot in widescreen on a digital camera, each of the three chapters is treated to emulate a different film stock — Fuji, Agfa and Kodak — emphasising different hues, as a glowing disc of colour marking the breaks announces, the central Agfa section, for example, picking out a special blue, cyan, in the moonlight.

It is a form of poetry, this film, at once utterly specific and universal. It is entirely about the black experience in the States (there are no speaking white parts) and within that specifically about the difficulties, in that struggling community, of finding a gay identity, when masculinity is restrictively defined and demanded. But it so involves and immerses you in its world that anybody can find himself or herself in it. If that’s not worth an Oscar or two, there hasn’t been a film this year that has.