Moonlight (2016): Three Chapters, One Life

The Three Chapters

The film is divided into three sections named for its protagonist at each stage. In the first, he is Little — a small, silent child in Miami's Liberty City neighbourhood, bullied, running from boys who call him a word he doesn't yet understand, found by a drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali) who gives him the first real kindness he has received. In the second, he is Chiron — a teenager, the same silence, a single transformative encounter with his closest friend Kevin on a moonlit beach. In the third, he is Black — an adult, built now into the kind of man nobody messes with, his body a fortress he has constructed around the boy who needed to be hidden.

The structure is the argument. We watch a person being formed — by neglect, by violence, by one night on a beach, by the decision he has made about what to be — and we understand, by the end, exactly what each stage cost and what it produced.

The Cinematography

James Laxton's cinematography is the film's most immediate quality: luminous, close, occasionally hand-held in a way that creates intimacy without instability. The Miami light — oceanic, warm, slightly humid — is unlike any light in previous American cinema. The close-ups are so close they feel like a kind of intimacy rather than technique.

Jenkins and Laxton drew on the work of Wong Kar-wai and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle — the dreamy, colour-saturated films of 1990s Hong Kong art cinema — as a visual reference, and the influence is there in the film's colour palette and in its relationship to time: scenes that feel suspended, elongated, as if the image wants to hold the moment it contains.

Mahershala Ali

Ali won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Juan, who appears only in the first chapter but shapes the entire film. His Juan is one of the finest characterisations in recent cinema: a drug dealer who is also, genuinely, a good man — or who wants to be, whose goodness and whose profession exist in a contradiction he has not resolved and will not.

The scene in which a young Chiron asks Juan what a "faggot" is, and Juan explains — gently, without evasion, sitting in the shallow water of a Florida swimming pool — is among the most quietly profound scenes in American cinema. What Juan offers Chiron is not answers but presence: an adult who will meet the question honestly.

The Beach

The encounter between teenage Chiron and Kevin on the beach is the film's emotional pivot — the moment that everything before it has been building toward and everything after it responds to. It is shot with a tenderness and a physical honesty that most American cinema cannot manage: two young men, the dark water, something that happens once and is never directly spoken of again.

What makes the scene extraordinary is not its content but its quality of attention. Jenkins films it as if the moment deserves to be held, to be given its full weight, to be witnessed without hurry or evasion. It does deserve all of this. So did Chiron. So does every gay man who had a version of this moment and found the world unwilling to acknowledge it.

The Third Chapter

The adult Chiron — Black, enormous, gold-toothed, armoured — is the film's most devastating invention. He has become the man he built to survive. He has not become, yet, the man he might be. The final chapter is the story of whether he can find his way back to something he locked away years ago: the possibility of being known.

The final sequence — Chiron and Kevin in a diner, the conversation that reaches back through decades — is held with the same quality of patient attention as the beach. Both actors are extraordinary. The film earns every feeling it produces.

BoysDo is built on the belief that gay male desire, and gay male life, deserves the full resources of serious aesthetic attention. *Moonlight* is the proof of that belief at its most complete: a film that gives a Black gay man's inner life the same quality of care, the same visual beauty, the same formal intelligence, as any other subject in cinema.

It also insists — quietly, through three chapters, without argument — that this story is American, is universal, is as worthy of the Oscar and the audience and the attention as anything else the culture produces.

It is. It won. It was right.