THE SCREENING ROOM
THE LOST BOY: Hibbert as Chiron, in the childhood first section of Moonlight.
DAVID BORNFRIEND/A24
AN ADAPTATION of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, director Barry Jenkins’s new movie, Moonlight, follows the first three decades of a poor, black, gay boy growing up in downtown Miami at the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. Put like that, you might expect something gritty, hard-hitting and faux-documentary in approach—a sun-soaked version of The Wire. In our current cinematic culture of Spandex-clad superheroes, its subject matter seems as fascinatingly far-flung as a news report from Mars. Yet without relinquishing his unfakeable feel for the streets, Jenkins has produced an intensely personal, poetic and gentle film about desire, identity and the fluid, fitful process by which we slip and stumble into ourselves. We don’t just grow up, the film suggests, but go up and down and backward, all at the same time.