‘Moonlight’ a moving coming-of-age drama that reflects director’s own youth

When Barry Jenkins read the script of a play about a young black man struggling with his identity while growing up in Miami, the director knew he had found a story he wanted to share.

In those pages was a rough neighbourhood like the one he grew up in, a drug-addicted mother like his own, and people trying to figure out who they were, just like those around him.

That script, with its deeply personal connections, became the inspiration for Jenkins’s “Moonlight,” a stirring film about an African American boy growing up an in impoverished community while slowing trying to figure out his sexuality.

“It was so relatable to me that I could see it,” Jenkins said of reading the unproduced play, “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” by Tarell Alvin McCraney.

“I felt like I was reading someone else’s memory of my memory of my childhood. And when that happens, as a visual storyteller, it clicks. I was like: I have to explore this.”

The film is broken into three intimate chapters, spotlighting the lead character, Chiron, at key moments as a young boy, a teenager, and a man.

“I haven’t seen a lot of films that treat this world or these characters in this way and yet, I know people like this,” Jenkins said, noting that he intentionally used significant stretches of silence in the film to emphasize Chiron’s evolution in response to the world around him.

“I wanted to show the interiority of a black character from this very black world that I grew up in.”

He acknowledges that his film ends up providing a commentary on the “performance of masculinity.”

“I wasn’t trying to make a gigantic statement on the state of black masculinity,” he said with a chuckle. “But I can’t deny, in both Tarell and I growing up in this world, there is a take away…. It’s like masculinity can become a performance.”

Trevante Rhodes can relate.

The actor who plays the toughened up adult version of Chiron remembers being tall, lanky and picked on when he was younger. He also recalls how he built up his now-muscular body in response.

“I always kind of struggled with identity, which for me is one of the themes of the film — knowing who you are, knowing who you love or knowing how to accept love,” he said. “It really resonated with me, having to kind of build a facade to kind of shelter myself away from the world because I was kind of insecure about who I was.”

Rhodes believes the movie has the potential to spur conversations about race, gender identity and acceptance.

“What’s most important is stripping away — whether it be race, gender, sexual orientation — stripping away that and just looking at a person for who they are, and accepting and loving them for who they are,” he said. “I think right now is a time when the world is ready to receive something like this.”

Singer and actress Janelle Monae, who plays the girlfriend of a drug dealer who becomes somewhat of a father figure for the young Chiron, agrees.

“I had people in my family who sold drugs, I had people in my family who were trying to discover their sexual identity. I had people in my family who were on drugs. But I hope (the film) resonates even more with people who may not have these people in their communities,” she said.

“If they can feel the empathy for these characters and a change of heart and not just reduce them to just being the have-nots or the people who made bad choices in their lives, but look at them as human beings, that to me is like a win.”

“Moonlight” opens in Toronto on Friday and in cities across Canada next month.

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