POWERFUL DRAMA OF ONE PERSON’S JOURNEY

Many people saw their lives reflected in Richard Linklater’s award-winning 2014 drama Boyhood. Even more did not — girls, for a start. Barry Jenkins’ second feature (he made Medicine for Melancholy in 2008), is basically Boyhood if it had been made about, well, someone else.

That doesn’t even begin to unpack the layers and resonances in this startling drama.

But it does address the central paradox of its success and popularity on the festival circuit and now in general release — to connect with a broad audience, make your story about a specific person. Because individuality is, ironically, the one thing we all have in common.

The individual at the centre of Moonlight is Chiron.

When we first meet him, however, the nine-year-old boy is known as Little, both by his friends — actually, Kevin seems to be his one and only in that category — and by the kids who are punishing him for the crime of being (of course), too much of an individual. “Soft,” they call him. And, more cruelly, “faggot.”

Seeking a moment’s peace by hiding out in an abandoned apartment, his path crosses with that of Juan (Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who takes the boy under his wing, teaching him to swim and to always sit facing the door.

For a black boy growing up in the rough, Liberty City neighbourhood of Miami, we sense the second lesson is the more useful.

Jenkins shoots these scenes with a soft light that recalls the early work of David Gordon Green, and with a consistently low angle, the better to approximate a child’s view of a frightening world. Little (Alex R. Hibbert), says little, but he’s clearly desperate to engage in some kind of communication with someone.

The film will get darker and the point of view higher as it continues; the most affecting scenes later in the story take place at night. Lacking Linklater’s 12-year shooting schedule, Jenkins opts to divide Little’s life into three chapters. The second, Chiron, finds the now-teenage boy (Ashton Sanders), struggling with his sexuality, his drug-addicted mother and his tormentors, who have grown up alongside him.

Much has been made of the film’s subtle commentary on the intersection of race, masculinity and sexuality in the lives of young African-Americans, but again, it is this specificity that makes the story so relatable. And the central question, asked several times of several characters — “Who is you?” – is one with which we must all grapple.

Part three, titled simply Black, finds Chiron (now Trevante Rhodes; seamless transitions between the actors), a very different man, at least on the outside.

The formerly “soft” boy is now hard, having modelled his look and even his career choice on his former drug-dealer father figure.

“That ain’t you,” says his old friend Kevin, vocalizing the flip side of “Who is you?”

But in truth Little/Chiron/ Black is still figuring out who he is. Moonlight doesn’t end so much as pause for breath as the scene fades to black.