Moonlight

Moonlight, American dramatic film, released in 2016, that unexpectedly won the Academy Award for best picture. The director and cowriter, Barry Jenkins, won praise for his empathetic depiction of complex characters. Based on the unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, it tells the story of a young Black man coming to grips with his attraction to other men. It was the first film with an entirely African American cast and the first with a gay main character to win the top Oscar.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Moonlight is set in the impoverished Liberty City area of Miami, shown in brilliant, luminous colours, and takes place in three acts. In the first act, successful drug dealer Juan (played by Mahershala Ali) sees a young boy fleeing a group of other boys threatening to beat him and follows the child into an abandoned apartment, into which he has locked himself for protection. The child (Alex Hibbert) refuses to speak but allows Juan to buy him a meal. Juan and his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe), take him into their home, where the boy says that his name is Chiron and that he is called Little, but he refuses to say where he lives until the following morning. Juan returns him to his mother (Naomie Harris), a user of crack cocaine who is emotionally abusive to the child. Juan and Teresa become an alternate family for Chiron, who does not know how to fit in with the other boys in the neighbourhood, though a friend, Kevin (Jaden Piner), tries to teach him.

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In the second act, Chiron (now played by Ashton Sanders) is in high school, where he is bullied by Terrel (Patrick Decile). His mother has sunk deeper into addiction, and he continues to be cared for by Teresa, though his mentor Juan is dead. One night on the beach, Chiron has a sexual encounter with Kevin (now played by Jharrel Jerome). Terrel then manipulates Kevin into knocking Chiron down to be kicked and beaten by Terrel and his cohort. When Chiron returns to school, he strides into the classroom and smashes a chair into Terrel. Chiron is then taken away in handcuffs.

In the third act, ten years have passed, and Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) is a muscle-bound drug dealer in Atlanta, patterning himself after Juan. His mother wants him to visit her in the drug rehab facility, and Kevin (André Howard), now a short-order cook and waiter in a diner in Miami, reaches out to him in a phone call. Chiron first visits his mother, they achieve a wary reconciliation, and then he goes to Kevin’s diner, where Kevin tries to draw him out. At Kevin’s apartment, Chiron confesses that he has been celibate since his encounter with Kevin, and he and Kevin come together.

The announcement for the best picture award at the 89th Academy Awards ceremony gained infamy when presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly named the musical La La Land the winner of the prize for best picture. They had been given the duplicate envelope for the previous award, which had gone to Emma Stone for her performance in La La Land. When show officials realized the mix-up, they interrupted the producers’ acceptance speeches to announce that the true winner was Moonlight.

Production notes and credits

• Studios: A24, PASTEL, and Plan B Entertainment
• Director: Barry Jenkins
• Writers: Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney
• Music: Nicholas Britell

Cast

• Mahershala Ali (Juan)
• Alex Hibbert (Chiron as a child)
• Janelle Monáe (Teresa)
• Naomie Harris (Paula, Chiron’s mother)
• Jaden Piner (Kevin as a child)
• Ashton Sanders (teenage Chiron)
• Patrick Decile (Terrel)
• Jharrel Jerome (teenage Kevin)
• Trevante Rhodes (adult Chiron)
• André Holland (adult Kevin)

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

• Picture*
• Supporting actor* (Mahershala Ali)
• Supporting actress (Naomie Harris)
• Cinematography
• Directing
• Editing
• Music
• Writing*