It's a fitting rebuttal to Parker's comment that he would never play a gay black man because he refuses to be "emasculated." This isn't to reduce Moonlight to the level of a Twitter clapback; quite the opposite. Jenkins's film ably tackles the pressures and strictures of masculinity, of which Parker's remarks are merely symptomatic.
Moonlight is a quiet coming-of-age story told in three segments, finding protagonist Chiron at a different point in his life each time. As a kid, he's played by Alex Little, who slinks through life saying as little as humanly possible, lips pursed, eyes wide, head down like a frightened dog. Kid Chiron gets bullied and hangs out with a drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali) and Juan's girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe) in lieu of going home to his crack-addicted mother (Naomie Harris).
Juan serves as something of a father figure to young Chiron, giving him a few diffuse life lessons, teaching him to swim, and most importantly explaining to Chiron that a "faggot" is just a word used to make gay people feel bad about themselves. Through DP James Laxton's lens these early scenes have a vivid, shimmering quality, soaked in Miami sunshine and popping with candy-color highlights.
As a teen, Chiron is played by lanky Ashton Sanders, who picks up on Little's body language but adds a layer of simmering anger. In this section we see Chiron struggle with the demands masculinity places on black men to be hard and aggressive, as well as experiment with his sexuality for the first time.
Here Jenkins and Laxton find one of their most evocative images: as Chiron's friend Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) strokes his cock on the beach, Chiron digs his fingers deep into the sand; and when he finishes, Kevin smoothly wipes his cum across the sand. Moonlight is adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney's play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, and aside from a brief callout in a line of dialogue it's Laxton's visuals that carry that motif throughout. With zero white characters, the film focuses all its attention on the spectrum of black beauty.
It also introduces a less-successful motif here, a slow-motion, Nicholas Winding Refn shot of Chiron's mother walking into her luridly pink-lit bedroom to fuck a john. Repeating this as a locus of psychological fission for young Chiron is flat-out schematic in a film that for its first two-thirds maintains abstract emotional distance.
Both these threads, of sexuality and parenthood, come together in the final third, which follows adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes). Here we see Chiron molding himself in the image of the trap, only vestiges of his younger self recognizable behind the gold fronts, dropped ride, and aggressive bluster. Adult Chiron is swole where young Chiron was scrawny and confident where he was withdrawn. He looks unmistakably like Juan, actually, down to the chains and do-rag.
The end of the film is where Jenkins knocks it out of the park, to be frank. The slightly aloof tone of the film, focused on poetic rushes of images as synecdoche for Chiron's emotional state, dissolves into naturalism. Chiron goes back to Miami to visit Kevin, both of them now grown, and we simply follow him. Rhodes and Andre Holland (The Knick), as adult Kevin, find genuine chemistry, and Jenkins stays out of their way. The sound of waves crashing on the shore, a chopped and screwed remix of Jideanna's "Classic Man," and Barbara Lewis's "Hello Stranger" color the proceedings, but don't overwhelm them.
Moonlight seems ambitious because it's a film by underrepresented creators telling an underrepresented story, but it remains resolutely intimate throughout. True, the score, by Nicholas Britell, can feel like it's forcing "plaintive" down your throat, and Jenkins opts for arthouse detachment maybe once too often. But by the time the film reaches its gorgeous, quiet conclusion it's clear that this is something special. No doubt Moonlight will be sold to general audiences in a way that downplays its specificity; this is a "universal" story, a "timeless" story of human connection!
But Moonlight is the story of a gay black man struggling to find himself in a culture that demands he present himself a certain way, that offers no room for the way he actually is. It's a love story; it's a subtle societal critique; it's a coming-of-age movie. Right now in America it can't help but signify more than itself, but we should let it do so on its own complicated, beautiful terms.
Moonlight
4 out of 5 stars
Rated R. Directed by Barry Jenkins.
Starring Naomie Harris, André Holland, Mahershala Ali, Janelle Monáe and Trevante Rhodes.
Opens November 18.
This article appears in Oct 20-27, 2016.