If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Fonny (short for Alonzo) now sits in jail, charged with a rape for which he’s so obviously not guilty that the prosecutor would be a laughingstock if Fonny weren’t black and the white cop who put him in a lineup wasn’t bent on settling a score. (“Are you ready for this?” “I’ve never been more ready for anything in my whole life.”) It’s a magic-in-the-moonlight moment, but it turns out to be a flashback. Jenkins opens If Beale Street Could Talk with an overhead traveling shot of the two radiantly beautiful young people on the night they’ve decided to become lovers.

There is the pure-hearted girl, 19-year-old Tish ( KiKi Layne), who longs to escape her corrosive New York City milieu the boy she loves, 22-year-old Fonny ( Stephan James), who’s unjustly accused of rape and an extended family of disparate men and women - some prim, some crude, some law-abiding, some crooked - who scramble to save Fonny from the fate of so many young black American men. Memphis’s Beale Street is where the blues were said to have been born, and for Baldwin the story that it would tell is one that would sum up black life in 20th-century America.

There’s always a jukebox, a spinning vinyl record, a full moon, to suggest a better world elsewhere. The tone oscillates: seductive, abrasive, seductive - but always beautiful, because Jenkins and his cinematographer, James Laxton, don’t do ugly. With his third feature, an adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins ( Moonlight) has cemented his style: lush and romantic on the surface, hyperrealistic and grim a short flight down.

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin