Moonlight is a perfectly successful movie that tells its story by indirection

Barry Jenkins's Moonlight is yet another strong and serious American film from 2016, a terrific, sorrowful account of a black child coming of age in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami. The child, called various Little, Chiron, and Black, is from the start - at the outset he is in grammar school, about 10 years old, an outsider, sensitive and unathletic, terribly shy, and bullied. A neighborhood drug dealer befriends him and acts like a "big brother," but the relationship goes off the rails when the child learns that the dealer has been selling to his neglectful and unstable mother. In the 2nd section of the film, the child - Chiron - is an awkward high-school kid, still the subject of taunts and bullying. In this section his homosexuality begins to emerge. There's one terrifically sad and moving scene as Chiron and his only friend gaze out at the ocean (or maybe Bicayne Bay) and reflect on their place in the world and their future. We see their "future" in section 3, with Chiron now buff and dangerous, a drug-dealer himself with a prison background. Another great scene in this section is his attempt at a reconciliation with his mother, now gone straight but seriously damaged by her years of abuse. It's hard to convey the essence of this movie except to say that, where the movie in lesser hands could have been mawkish, sentimental, melodramatic, violent, or didactic, it's none of these things. Jenkins's storytelling is cool and distant, he lets the characters speak for themselves and in their own tongue - street-smart, hesitant, sometimes w/ bursts of insight, sometimes just meandering: Chiron is shy and understated throughout, for example, and many significant scenes and life stages - Chiron's time in prison, for example - are hinted at but not depicted. The cinematography is quite beautiful, contrasting the hard lives of each of the characters with the bright, tropical colors or Miami architecture and commerce. The movie reminded me of the excellent examination of a young white man's life over a long course of time, Boyhood, though Jenkins followed the more conventional path and used 3 actors to play the lead at different life stages. This is a completely successful movie - sure to win major awards for its beauty, insight, and timeliness.