Moonlight, the new film by Barry Jenkins, follows a gay African-American’s quest for identity in a disadvantaged section of Miami. Just as the moon projects no light of its own, but bounces reflected sunlight off its surface, so too the cypher at the core of Jenkins’ drama derives his earliest sense of self from what others make of him. Yet Moonlight is richly illuminating.

The production designer Hannah Beachler was tapped to visualize its three distinct phases. Drawn from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the film pauses the life of Chiron in the early 1980s, 1992 and 2002. When we first meet him, during the height of Reagan’s War on Drugs, he’s the class runt (Alex Hibbert) whom his peers taunt as “soft” and nickname “Little.” He flees their bullying into a crack den, where empathic drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) coaxes him home for a nourishing meal with his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monaé) and becomes a father figure. Chapter two catches up with the protagonist in high school as he’s discovering forbidden romance and negotiating his sexuality. Ashton Sanders plays this 16 year old, under the name his crack addict mother (Naomie Harris) christened him: Chiron. For the final chapter, Trevante Rhodes does the honors, as a 26-year-old drug dealer who answers to Black. That was the name his onetime lover Kevin gave him in his teens.

Fueled by Jenkins’ and McCraney’s respective boyhood memories, the production plumbs their hometown milieu for layers of subtext. What dialogue is spoken in Moonlight is lyrical and affecting, yet beginning with Little’s refusal to speak, it’s often in short supply. That’s where the visual language works it magic. Beachler came to the project with credits ranging from Fruitvale Station and Miles Ahead to Creed and the TV special Beyoncé: Lemonade. She shared her insights with me here:

http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/1280/54th_new_york_film_festival_spotlight_production