![]() ![]() That the protagonist chooses to change names in each phase of his life (with each segment named after Chiron’s given moniker) highlights the character’s evolution, and the transformative effect of seemingly small events over time. Hibbert) going by the unsolicited nickname Little then we leap ahead to Chiron in high school (now played by Ashton Sanders), after he has taken back his given name but is still mercilessly picked on for being different and then in Act III, going by the name Black, a hardened Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) runs a drug ring in Atlanta and masks his insecurities with unnerving shows of masculinity. The film is a triptych: Act I sees a near-mute elementary school child (Alex R. Playing Along: What a Feeling By Andrew ChanĪn adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, Moonlight follows the first three decades in the life of Chiron, who was born poor, black, and gay in 1980s Miami. ![]() It is a necessary film for this moment in time, when the extinguishing of black men of all backgrounds, out of fear, becomes more visible-and less acceptable-to the general public. Moonlight isn’t just a very good film, though it is in fact that. With self-assured elegance, Moonlight takes back these shared points of human experience so that they might also reside in black communities and be borne out by black bodies, in a time when such depictions are still rare in independent cinema. These are the kinds of moments and images that critics love to champion as “universal,” but in practice this particular universe tends to belong on screen to the white, straight middle class. Moonlight, the remarkable new film by Barry Jenkins, who directed the gentle romantic drama Medicine for Melancholy (2008), revels in the elevation of everyday experience, transforming time’s passing into a series of rites of passage, the commonplace into the iconic. The first touches of desire in the safe, warm dark with a friend one fervently hopes will become more than a friend. The exhilaration of learning to float in the ocean, gently released from loving grownup arms. The half-lovely, half-dangerous energy of two little boys running in the sunlight, moving together instinctively like a flock of birds. ![]()
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