Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight premiered at the 43rd Telluride Film Festival on September 2, 2016, before A24 released it in the United States on October 21, 2016. It runs 112 minutes. It grossed over $65 million worldwide. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards, along with Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, from eight total nominations. This is our review, and the verdict is simple: this is one of the best films of its decade.
Trailer, via A24.
Three Actors, One Chiron
The film tells the story of Chiron across three stages: childhood, adolescence, and early adult life. Each chapter casts a different actor in the role. Alex Hibbert plays child Chiron, called “Little.” Ashton Sanders plays teen Chiron. Trevante Rhodes plays adult Chiron, called “Black.”
Kevin, Chiron’s romantic interest, is likewise split across three performers. Jaden Piner plays child Kevin. Jharrel Jerome, in his feature debut, plays teen Kevin. André Holland plays adult Kevin.
That structure is the film’s central gamble, and it pays off completely. Three actors build one person without ever sharing a scene. The continuity lives in the writing and in the performances, not in a face.
Mahershala Ali as Juan
Ali plays Juan, a drug dealer who becomes a father figure to Chiron. Janelle Monáe plays Teresa, Juan’s girlfriend, in her first film appearance. Naomie Harris plays Paula, Chiron’s drug-addicted mother.
Ali won Best Supporting Actor for the role. The casting was not obvious. Jenkins was hesitant about Ali because of his work as Remy Danton on House of Cards. A producer on the film proposed him, having worked with him on Kicks. Jenkins was convinced after seeing Ali’s range and his grasp of the character.
Ali called the part an important chance to play an African-American male mentor. He drew on his own experience of growing up with a Juan.
Monáe was sent the script and connected to Teresa right away. For a first film appearance, it is an unusually grounded piece of work. She plays the closest thing Chiron has to a safe room.
Naomie Harris Said No First
Harris did not want the role. She was reluctant to portray Paula, saying she did not want to play a stereotypical depiction of a black woman.
Jenkins answered the concern by tying the character to real people: Paula represents both his mother and McCraney’s mother. Harris had previously vowed not to play a crack addict. She said the script and the director’s tolerance changed her mind.
Her preparation was concrete. She watched interviews of people with crack cocaine addiction and met with addicted women. She connected their attempts to escape trauma to her own experiences of bullying.
This is the part of Moonlight that is easiest to get wrong, and the film does not get it wrong. Paula is not a lesson. She is a person who keeps failing a child who keeps coming back.
McCraney’s Unpublished Play
Jenkins wrote the screenplay, based on McCraney’s unpublished semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. McCraney shares the adapted screenplay credit.
Holland had acted in McCraney’s plays before. He had read In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue a decade before the film came out. He was drawn to adult Kevin when he read the script later.
[The script] was the best thing I’ve ever read
That is Holland’s line, and it is not a press-tour line. A decade of familiarity with the source, then a script that made him want the part anyway, is about as clear a signal as an actor gives.
Miami, and the Way It Looks
The film was shot in Miami, Florida, starting in 2015. It opened in the United States through A24.
The reception was universal acclaim. The praise was unanimous on the editing, the cinematography, the score, Jenkins’s direction and screenplay, and the handling of sexuality and masculinity. Harris and Ali drew widespread acclaim as well.
Moonlight has since been cited as one of the best films of the 2010s and of the 21st century. It was released as the first LGBTQ-themed mass-marketed feature film with an all-black cast.
That last fact is a market fact, not an artistic one, and it should be read that way. The film’s importance to distribution is real. It is also the least interesting thing about it.
Where Moonlight Sits
Here is the comparison that matters most, and it is internal to the film.
| Chapter | Chiron | Kevin | What the pairing does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Childhood | Alex Hibbert (“Little”) | Jaden Piner | Introduces touch as something Chiron does not know how to hold |
| Adolescence | Ashton Sanders | Jharrel Jerome | Turns that touch into a first love, then into a loss |
| Early adulthood | Trevante Rhodes (“Black”) | André Holland | Shows what Chiron built to survive the middle chapter |
The film explores Chiron’s difficulties with his homosexuality and his identity as a black homosexual man, including the physical and emotional abuse he endures growing up. The synopsis calls it the tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters, as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love.
That is accurate, and it undersells the discipline. Jenkins never explains Chiron to the audience. He shows three versions of a person and lets the gaps do the work. The tagline is “This is the story of a lifetime,” and for once the tagline is not inflation.
What Actually Decides It
The performances decide it. Rhodes, Sanders and Hibbert each carry a chapter without leaning on the others. Holland makes adult Kevin the film’s quietest and most devastating presence. Ali makes Juan a man whose kindness and whose trade cannot be separated, and the film never tries to separate them.
Harris is the other pillar. Her Paula is the reason Chiron’s silence reads as survival rather than shyness.
The craft holds up alongside them. Editing, cinematography and score all earned the praise they got, and none of them is doing the emotional work for the actors. Jenkins’s screenplay is the spine: three chapters, no wasted scene, no speech that tells you what a look already said.
The one thing worth flagging is the awards record, because it can distort how a film gets remembered. Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Ali, Best Adapted Screenplay, eight nominations. That is a fact about a campaign as much as about a movie. Moonlight would be the same film without the statue.
Chiron’s Silence
Moonlight is a 2016 American drama written and directed by Barry Jenkins, based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished semi-autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. It stars Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali. It is 112 minutes long, and it does not waste one of them.
The film’s reputation is deserved, and the reason is not the milestone language about casting or the awards haul. It is that three actors, one screenplay and a Miami shot in 2015 add up to a single life you believe in. The abuse Chiron endures growing up is not staged for shock. The love is not staged for comfort. Both are just there, the way they are in a life.
Our score is 9.9 of 10.
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