It’s a disorienting scene, not so much because of what happens as because of what doesn’t happen. Maybe Juan is looking at his past while the boy looks up at a future he didn’t know he could have. Inside, in a dark, silent space, the kid stares at Juan, and Juan stares at the kid. Juan follows, entering through a blasted-out window, a symbol, perhaps, of the ruin left by the riots. He’s being pursued by a group of boys, and he ducks into a condemned building to escape. 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 can’t afford to this situation, any situation, could be changed in an instant by a gun or a knife. (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. Stepping out of his car, Juan asks a cranky drug runner what’s up.
Crack is spreading through the city like a fever. 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. He’s a dope dealer, so there’s that, too. That’s how Juan (the beautiful Mahershala Ali) carries himself-defensively, warily. 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.
Photograph by Gabriele Stabile for The New Yorkerĭid 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.įour 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. Ashton Sanders, as the teen-age Chiron, has a conjurer’s gifts, and an intuitive understanding of how the camera works.