MOONLIGHT

Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winner championed the outsider but struck a universal chord

A FILM THAT feels like a bold statement of artistic intent, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is one of the most memorable of the past 20 years. It looks into the life of a young black boy, Chiron, living in working-class Miami and struggling over the years to come to terms with his sexuality. As Chiron grows, Jenkins splits his story into a triptych structure, using three different actors to depict him at different stages of his life. Unable to fully rely on his strung-out single mother, he looks up to local drug dealer Juan, played in a career-changing performance by Mahershala Ali. Juan treats the lost Chiron with a sort of tough-guy tenderness that helps to define his early years. In one scene, Juan shows the young Chiron how to swim, a stand-in father whose loss is later felt keenly in spite of it never being shown or explained on screen. In high school as a teen, Chiron’s very lack of Juan — and that inherited toughness — marks him out as a target for bullying; actor Ashton Sanders perfectly embodies the gawkiness of an out-of-place adolescent who can’t help but eye one of the more popular — and kinder — boys. Then Chiron is thrown into prison. In the final section, the results of his incarceration and the path he has followed bear themselves out — but Trevante Rhodes is still yearning for something more, and finds it in André Holland, the grown-up crush from school. With an elliptical, luminous quality that makes it as dreamlike as it is rooted in the hard realities of Chiron’s life, there’s something haunting about the film’s final section — and lingeringly romantic.

Both as a look into the kinds of lives rarely seen in American cinema and as a visual achievement of astonishing poetry and melancholy, Moonlight is a masterpiece.