Moonlight (15)

four stars

Dir: Barry Jenkins

With: Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Alex R Hibbert

Runtime: 111 minutes

FOR all the hype and hyperventilating that surrounds the Oscars, the annual love-in at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood does perform a stellar role in spotlighting small but beautifully formed films that deserve to break out of the art house ghetto and play to mainstream acclaim. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is such a picture.

Full disclosure: it is not quite a plucky little outsider. No film produced by Brad Pitt could ever be that. But the subjects Moonlight deals with, sexuality and addiction among them, and the characters it portrays, are too often kept in the margins of cinema or dealt with in a trite fashion. Not here, though.

While the story takes place in the drugs-blighted badlands of urban America, a place perhaps wearily familiar to every television viewer or cinemagoer, Jenkins’ film manages to be constantly surprising, taking the audience’s assumptions and holding them up to the light the better to point out the flaws.

When first we meet the film’s central character, Chiron, he is a boy running from bullies in a rundown part of Miami. Small, skinny, frightened, with no pal to come to his aid, Chiron seeks sanctuary in a “dope hole”, an abandoned house used for dealing. It is there that Juan (Mahershala Ali), a dealer, comes across the child and takes him home. Home should be a safe place, but since his mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), is a regular buyer of what the likes of Juan sells it is just another place that the boy tries to avoid.

Though wary of Juan initially, Paula soon sees the benefits of having an unpaid babysitter. As for Chiron, he is taken to Juan’s house, meets his girlfriend, has dinner, and gets a taste of what a loving, secure home is like. So life continues, with Juan doing all the things a good father would do, from teaching Chiron to swim to encouraging him to be himself, whatever the bullies call him.

If it wasn’t for the drug dealing, Juan and his girlfriend would look like regular good Samaritans. But how much of a stand-up guy can Juan be given how he earns his money? This is just one of many questions Harris’s screenplay, from a story by Tarell Alvin McCraney, poses. There will be no black and white, right and wrong answers here, just many shades of grey.

Though Jenkins is best known so far for his short films, he shows an astonishing boldness when it comes to telling a longer story. He has a lot to pack in, tracing Chiron’s progress from boy to teen to man, but he does not get bogged down in detail, instead making bold narrative leaps and trusting the audience to keep up. In this way, he keeps the story tightly focused and the pace brisk. So we follow Chiron into adulthood, seeing how some things change utterly for him, yet others remain disappointingly the same.

It is not just in character and story that Jenkins’ film challenges assumptions. The score by Nicholas Britell uses classical and operatic pieces as the backdrop to the sometimes brutal urban drama, beauty and beastliness mixed. Unsurprisingly, Britell is among the film’s eight Oscar nominations for his score.

Also in contention on February 26 are Ali and Harris for best supporting actors. Harris shows that Kate Winslet and The Wire’s Idris Elba are not the only Britons who can do a pitch perfect American accent. She has a tough gig in making a difficult character understandable never mind likeable, but she finds a way. Her character is another who could have been just another accumulation of cliches, yet she makes Paula’s story seem fresh and compelling. We want to know what happens to her as much as anyone else in the film. As for Ali, buy shares early and buy often. Between Moonlight, and the forthcoming drama Hidden Figures, his stock in Hollywood is selling faster than red carpet.

Exclusive Scottish previews at Glasgow Film Theatre from tomorrow; on wider release from Friday, February 17.