Moonlight

2016 - Directed by Barry Jenkins.  Written by Barry Jenkins based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney.  Starring Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Travante Rhodes, Janelle Monáe, Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali

★★★★★

Sometimes,  a movie just works from beginning to end and when you search for something, anything to criticize it starts coming down to "oh hey, I'd have liked more of this one thing."  Such is Moonlight, the story of a young boy in Miami searching for his identity in three separate phases of his life.  We first meet him around ten, called Little, as he's dealing with a mother sort of keeping it together as a nurse who also has a crack habit and also dealing with bullies chasing him from school.  It's the sort of thing where you can tell this has been going on for a while and could be going on for quite a while more.



One day, he meets a drug dealer named Blue (played by Mahershala Ali in a performance that should be an easy Oscar nomination) who changes his life by showing simply talking to him and feeding him along with his partner Teresa (an also excellent Janelle Monáe).  They fill a need for parenting and even just companionship that he's not getting at home. It's simply amazing how well these scenes work, as quite Little is dealing with these nice people who are, really, also selling drugs to his mother.

The second and third sections of the movie, as Little becomes Chiron (at around 16) and Black (at about 26) are equally amazing as we see this same young man, played by different actors in each section, coming to terms with his own identity and his mother (a very good Naomie Harris).  It's one of those movies you don't want to say too much more about since it's all in the experience, but everyone should see this and just bathe in the love and pain of it.  Hell, I haven't even gotten into his friend Kevin (also played by three separate actors) who has an important part in his life.

Especially worth noting in this is James Laxton's cinematography.  He's not getting enough praise for his beautiful, close work in this and being able to shoot black skin tones (an underappreciated art in film, which had for decades focused on how best to film white people and wasn't the best with other skin tones).  Laxton has been working with Barry Jenkins for over a decade and this makes me want to dig into their entire body of work together.