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Moonlight is hardly a documentary. Its structure is a theatrical three acts, with three different actors playing the main character, Chiron (pronounced Shy-RONE), coming of age over two decades. And yet, its profound realism stems from director Barry Jenkins' camera, always searching for Chiron on the rough Liberty City blocks of 1980s Miami. Even against an impoverished backdrop, Moonlight never goes out of its way to declare this black or queer American experience as brutal. Nothing is so fundamentalist here. Nor are any of the performances loud or Oscar-hungry, including the show-stealing supporting ones by Mahershala Ali and André Holland. Every piece of Moonlight is staged in service to a humanist question: What would love mean to a boy who's been conditioned to hide?
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We first spy Chiron at age 10, fleeing his peers. He's eluding the rocks—but not the gay slurs—they're hurling at him. Chiron hasn't invited their hatred or his mother's (Naomie Harris) with anything more than his passivity and slight build. Those qualities also draw sympathizers to him: his lifelong sounding board Kevin (Holland in the third act), the paternal neighborhood dealer, Juan (Ali), and Juan's doting girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe). The cast juxtaposes scorn with kindness and abuse with intimacy, but the time shifts reveal everyone is somewhere in cycle of atonement. Chiron's introversion is the constant. By adulthood (Trevante Rhodes), Chiron is a product of questioning his sexuality and manhood in a world where personal security means not asking those questions.
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Like its protagonist, Moonlight is artfully succinct, perhaps a little shy in its revelations. What becomes of the supporting cast as the acts turn over? Does Chiron really have so little to say on his own behalf? Granted, forced answers would ruin what Jenkins has so beautifully divided and arranged. You could compare it to Boyhood, but Moonlight is more an experiment in blank space than a gradual progression. The changes in Chiron—the vulnerability hardening into armor—happen mostly off-screen. Thirty-year-old Chiron doesn't have to spell out being a monster or a victim; watching him grow up emotionally walled in, constantly driven inward, hits hard enough. Because every time Chiron ages out of a storyline, you feel a pang for having neglected him, too.
Critic's Rating: A-
Moonlight is rated R. It opens Friday at Cinema 21.
Willamette Week