A poetic dissection of race, masculinity & sexuality.

To call Moonlight a personal film would be something of an understatement. Adapted from the unpublished play Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the combined blood, sweat, and tears of writer-director Barry Jenkins and its creator Tarell Alvin McCraney have been poured into a film that cuts deep to the heart of both talents. Set up as a semi-autobiographical amalgam of their early lives, Moonlight has been a true labour of love for both playwright and director; taking near-on thirteen years to make it from paper to screen.

On the surface, this could very easily lead to a film so intensely personal as to become impenetrable to a general audience but it’s to the immense credit of everyone involved that Moonlight avoids this altogether. While the locations, actions and characters are projections of its creators, this is a film for and about everyone. There are many, many factors to the overwhelming success of Moonlight but the deep, personal connection to the material from its architects is palpable and it’s in Barry Jenkins’s ability to create a story that’s at once intimate and universal that serves as the driving force behind the film’s achievements.

Told in three distinct time periods, Moonlight chronicles the life of a young African-American man Chiron, from childhood to adulthood, as he struggles to get a handle on himself, those around him, and his place in the world; all while navigating the hostile streets of Liberty City, Miami.

We first meet Chiron as a shy withdrawn child nicknamed “Little” (Alex R. Hibbert), hiding from an emotionally abusive mother Paula (Naomie Harris) and striking up an unlikely kinship with Cuban drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali). Fast-forwarding to a teenage Chiron (Ashton Sanders), continuing in his attempt to avoid bullies, the emotional manipulations of his addict mother, and his inner sexual awakenings. In the film’s final chapter, we meet a young adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes), now a drug dealer on the streets of Atlanta and going by the name “Black”. While the bullies are now long gone, he continues to actively avoid contact with his mother, while struggling with his identity and sexuality. Though clearly attempting to bury his old life in Miami, cracks finally begin to appear in his façade, as a meeting with an old friend begins to tease out the real Chiron from deep within.

It’s a special breed of film that can be about nothing and everything all at once and Moonlight nails it by simultaneously keeping things simple, while weaving in the kind of complexity that will stay with you long after the credits roll. The film is deep in subtext and speaks to a variety of intricate universal truths but tackles them in the most unassuming way possible.

Moonlight is a film of enormous themes told through slice-of-life storytelling as it fades in and out of Chiron’s life, leaving sentences unfinished and questions left hanging. As an exercise in intelligence and restraint, the film’s beauty is in the assumed aptitude of its audience, never once grandstanding or over-playing its themes of love, identity, friendship, and family; preferring to let conclusions be drawn naturally.

Like its protagonist, Moonlight feels torn, with its head and its heart pulling in fascinatingly alternate directions. While, at heart, it’s a deeply personal film about a singular journey of self-discovery, Moonlight’s motivations are fundamentally political. Playing out like a powerful combination of Richard Linklater’s gentle, real-time coming-of-age drama Boyhood and the pointed intensity of John Singleton’s early films, Moonlight is at its best when balancing these conflicts and refusing to take the easy route.

Though it’s not afraid to weave in the odd fantastical elements or two, Moonlight really is as close to putting real life to the screen as you’re likely to get and, in doing so, it can often be a tough watch if you’re unwilling to get down and dirty with it. Like life, you’re not going to be spoon-fed as things are left dangling, questions often remain unanswered, and clear-cut conclusions never forthcoming. Moonlight may ultimately be a hit but this is as far removed from mainstream storytelling as you’re going to get from a likely awards contender.

Chiron himself is a veritable closed book - all shrugs and glances as his verbal communication is kept to a bare minimum throughout all three incarnations. It’s to the immense credit of each of the three actors playing the character that, as frustrating as his reticence can be, they imbue him with just the right level of empathy and a fragility to pull you in.

Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes, who play teenage and adult Chiron respectively, do an incredible job in both of their portrayals, however, the real star of the Chiron show is Alex R. Hibbert as Little. Barely uttering a word for the majority of the first act, Little is at once confused, bullied and fragile, but there are clear glimmers of strength and hope beginning to ignite his young eyes. These tempered emotions will continue to simmer just below the skin as he grows older, only occasionally reaching the surface but Hibbert does a superb job at planting the seeds that will gradually grow as the film progresses and his performance is the foundation on which the entire film is built.

Like our own lives, Chiron’s story would be nothing without it’s supporting players and, as each of the film’s three chapters unfolds, we are given glimpses of the character’s story primarily through his connection with an ally. Family and friends play a huge part in Chiron’s growth, but the strongest of these is by far the most unconventional, as Little finds kinship with the drug dealing Juan.

With scant regard for stereotypes, this opening act sets Juan up as a conventional streetwise gangster figure, but very quickly inverts expectations; portraying him as a surprisingly stable paternal figure, able to imbue a young and vulnerable Chiron with words of wisdom and the encouragement to be exactly who he wants to be. There is a true bond between the two and, even as Juan’s physical presence is absent from chapters two and three, his spirit clearly never leaves Chiron.

In their last exchange, Little heartbreakingly asks Juan what the word faggot means. Juan’s reply is as simple as it is unexpected and, while it’s definitely not the answer you expect, the echoes of his simple words only come into full focus when we are much further along Chiron’s life journey.

Though his part in the film is short-lived, Mahershala Ali truly shines. While Naomie Harris and Andre Holland turn in fantastic performances as Chiron’s mother and grown-up school friend, Ali’s presence is felt long after he has gone. As a drug dealer and gangster-with-a-heart, Juan could easily fall into cliché, but through Ali’s powerfully subtle performance this is far from the case. Through his television work on House of Cards and Marvel’s Luke Cage, Ali has found himself adept at nuanced villainy and blurred moral codes but his turn here as Juan feels like the culmination of Ali’s career to date and it’s clear the actor’s next chapter is going to be something worth very watching closely indeed.

With its stereotype challenging and reluctance to pander to conventional expectations, Moonlight is a singular vision from writer-director Barry Jenkins and an incredibly moving piece of cinema to boot. Supplemented by a small but talented cast, the film takes aim at preconceived notions of race, gender, poverty, and sexuality with a subtlety of tone that speaks to grand universal truths, while keeping things as personal as possible. Regardless of who you are or where you come from, there’s a little Chiron is all of us and the sooner we embrace it, the better.