Moonlight is a quiet film.

I actually had to turn up my speakers just to hear the dialogue, and had to turn them up even more when, after ten minutes, our protagonist resentfully speaks his first words. He doesn’t follow those words up with too many more. Whoever else he is, Little, or Chiron, or Black, is not one for big speeches. His feelings maintain an internal smolder, clear in his downturned eyes and inward-sloping shoulders and perpetual inability to stand in the middle of the frame. Our hero is a man of big feelings afforded minimal release. There is so much there, so much contained in all his unhappy, furtive glances, so much preserved across the astonishingly congruent performances of three brilliant actors.

Moonlight is the story of a young gay black man doing his best to make it through life, told across three formative subchapters of his early years. In the first, as a child, he forges an unlikely bond with a local drug dealer while his mother falls into addiction. In the second, he suffers through vicious bullying at school, and also has his first sexual experience. In the third, he’s a fully grown man, attempting to navigate adulthood with the tools he’s been given.

Each of these subsections is titled with a different name for our protagonist, starting with the dismissive “Little” riffing on his stature, shifting to his given name Chiron as a teen, and concluding on the name that one of his only friends gave him, Black. This framing device centers our focus on Chiron’s identity, which is important; the process of developing your own identity, and how our selfhood reflects our environment, are central fascinations for Moonlight. As Chiron’s adopted mentor Juan tells him “at some point you gotta decide for yourself who’re gonna be. You can’t let anyone make that decision for you.” None of the names Chiron cycles through are ones he chose for himself, but he does his best to bear them, and to find himself beneath their weight.

Chiron’s difficulty in finding that personal truth ends up serving as a stinging indictment of American society, and the ways our country inherently criminalizes being black, poor, or gay, but those truths are illustrated incidentally, without any need for direct focus. Moonlight is emphatically a film about Chiron and his feelings first, an illustration of personal truth that can’t help but reflect America’s ugliness, because America is ugly like this. This is a story about Chiron, and just as he can’t choose his own name, he also can’t transcend the barriers and limitations of an American life.

Those limitations strike like soft thunder throughout this film. Chiron’s father is absent all through this film, and when we see his mother, she alternates between fraying from overwork and jittering from cocaine. The opening scene of Moonlight sees him literally chased by his peers into a crack addicts’ abandoned apartment block, fiddling idly with their shattered glass before being found by Juan. The implication is clear: if not for this passing stranger who happened to be extremely compassionate, Chiron could have been lost there, or anywhere. Chiron hangs suspended over a pit, with no personal ties or public net to protect him.

In the first act, it’s Juan who rescues Chiron, giving him many of the tools he’ll need to survive. These tools aren’t just actual advice, but also simply the empathy, quiet understanding, and time necessary to make a child feel wanted. There are multiple scenes of Chiron quietly eating at Juan’s girlfriend Theresa’s home, scenes where Chiron barely says a thing, but slowly comes to understand that he is not unwanted there. In one of the film’s most transcendent moments, Juan teaches Chiron how to swim, telling him that “from here, it feels like you’re at the center of the world.” One more natural metaphor; from a boy floundering in open seas, Juan offers direction and hope, telling Chiron he truly can gain the power to triumph in this place.

Juan’s importance as a mentor for Chiron only makes his later disappearance that much harder to take. After being so critical to to Chiron’s early development and ultimate outlook, Juan never appears again in the film’s second or third segments. His absence is assumed, like the absence of so many other things Chiron desperately needed. Juan doesn’t get the time to teach Chiron true self-love; whether locked away for dealing or lost for some other arbitrary reason, this world steals people like Juan from people like Chiron, steals them so consistently that their absence isn’t worth remarking on. Juan’s absence speaks louder for how little it is noted; this is life in America, where non-incarceration for black men is an inherent luxury.

With Juan gone, Chiron is left without guidance, spinning through hardships he can’t possibly handle on his own. As with Juan’s absence, the way Chiron’s circumstances shape and constrain him is rarely remarked on, but always clear. Even if Juan could only teach Chiron how to survive as a drug dealer, he still taught Chiron a way to survive. How the fuck else is Chiron supposed to make it through? The impossibility of any “normal route” for Juan is made vividly clear in one of the film’s most painful segments, when an ugly fight with his mother leads directly into one more day at school. How could Chiron or any kid put their head down and think about white blood cells, just minutes after their mother stole their money to buy drugs?

Chiron is forced to make do. Both the first and second segments end on the harsh fault lines of this “making do,” the consequences dictated by choices that were never really choices at all. In the first, perhaps the final moment of Little’s childhood is the moment when he learns his savior Juan is complicit in the trade that’s ruining his mother’s life. In the second, the failure of traditional authority figures to protect him from violent bullying forces him to take matters into his own hands. And so he’s packed into the back of a police cruiser, his adolescence severed by the fulfillment of one more American promise.

Of course, Moonlight is a great deal more than a withering takedown of the American dream, and also more than your average character study. Moonlight is an often harrowing but also uplifting film, a resolute tone piece, a loving expression of Chiron’s lived experience. It is astonishing how well this film brings this one boy’s interiority to life, from its often cacophonous soundtrack to how well it captures Chiron’s view of his own displacement and illegitimacy wherever he goes. Moonlight is the kind of film that you could analyze entirely on the basis of its three nearly silent car rides, each long, wordless trip reflecting Chiron’s evolving selfhood in its own way.

It’s also an astonishingly beautiful film. Shot mostly by hand-cam, Moonlight manages to benefit from the dramatic immediacy that choice provides while still offering consistently perfect compositions and utterly gorgeous lighting. Moonlight expresses its beauty through its ferocity, through its profundity, through its silence, and through its splendor. Though Chiron is held down by the circumstances of his life again and again, Moonlight never sees anything short of beauty in his experience. Moonlight is often devastating, but it is never hopeless. There is always a light at the end.

In Moonlight, that light takes the form of the ocean, the place Juan once taught him to swim. In one more example of Moonlight’s brilliant incidental storytelling, Chiron’s rote journey back to that ocean as a teen reveals to us that this is a pilgrimage he’s made many times before. There, for once “at the center of the world,” he meets his friend Kev, and admit that sometimes he cries so much he feels like he’s just going to dissolve into water. Kev matches this confession with a happier thought: that the breeze which comforts them so completely can be felt even back in their own towns, if just for a moment, just barely.

That memory of freedom and belonging lingers as all else fades. As an adult, having been abandoned by both the people and the institutions that were “supposed” to support him, Chiron is a product of what lessons survived. His personal style and profession mirror Juan’s exactly; who else was he supposed to become? The initially quiet, downcast boy who admitted his sadness to Kev now acts with confidence in confrontations, and maintains an appearance of strength at all times. Chiron changes so much that Kev almost doesn’t recognize him; but Chiron didn’t choose this identity, the world chose his identity for him.

And yet, for all its tragic turns and inevitability and preoccupation with societal violence, Moonlight is ultimately an optimistic film. When Kev unexpectedly calls Chiron near the beginning of the third act, the scars of a hard life fade in a moment; we see Chiron’s vulnerability again, his desperate longing for closeness, for comfort. That phone call seems to carry the sea breeze with it; from there, Chiron spends the last act of Moonlight taking command of his life, choosing what he wants to do at every turn. After long years spent hating the mother who neglected him, he can no longer summon the anger; only tears remain, and an understanding that the woman who screamed “don’t look at me” at her son must have felt just as powerless as he did. We are all defined by our circumstances in many ways, but we can find a kinship in that, if we can forgive.

Driving back down to his hometown, Moonlight’s final act turns into an unexpected romance, a tentative reunion between Chiron and Kev that doubles as a reunion between Chiron and all of his past selves. Slowly, across lovingly cooked meals and awkward conversations, that thoughtful boy who was so full of tears reemerges. When Kev at last admits “I never had time for what I wanted to do – it was hard enough to do what other folks thought I should do,” Chiron’s responding “and now?” carries understanding, hope, and a little fear. In this quiet apartment, there is a breeze, there is a light, there are all our past selves and future fragments alive at once. The world can take so much from us, but it cannot take these moments. We decide when we drift on the breeze, and we decide when we turn to the light.

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