Upending our assumptions, filmmaker Barry Jenkins finds tenderness and hope where we least expect them
By Jonathan Escoffery
Picture this: It’s movie night, 2016, and projected onto the big screen, you watch a dark-skinned crack dealer breaking through a boarded-up window to retrieve the equally dark preteen hiding in his crack house. They’re strangers—it’s apparent. The dealer grins at the terrified boy before inviting him to share a meal. The boy reluctantly acquiesces, and as they dine together, it becomes clear the boy, Chiron, is the kind of famished that implies neglected, unwatched over. Soon after, they’re driving to the man’s home.
By all narrative expectations, the boy should be in peril, destined for tragedy. But in Barry Jenkins’ world, the unexpected happens: tenderness emerges. What follows is not violence or despair but an act of care—from Black man to Black boy—that shifts the entire trajectory of the boy’s life. It’s a sequence that subverts our assumptions about Black masculinity and reveals Jenkins’ singular gift as a filmmaker: his ability to locate profound grace and hope in unlikely places.
Nearly a decade after the release of “Moonlight,” Jenkins’ name evokes narratives of raw beauty and unfiltered humanity. To love Jenkins’ work is to embrace worlds in which every glance, every prolonged silence, carries heft and shimmers with life. Jenkins wields extended moments of quiet as intimacy builders, between viewers and his films, and between characters—whether in the potent silences between Chiron and Kevin, his friend and love interest in “Moonlight,” or the radiant, unwavering gaze of Tish, the main character, and her beloved friend Fonny in “If Beale Street Could Talk”; body language—along with the natural din of the cities these bodies inhabit—draws us closer to how it feels to be alive than dialogue ever could.
Fully appreciating Jenkins’ oeuvre means first understanding his roots. Raised in Liberty City, Miami, Jenkins was steeped in the challenges and fortitude of that community—his upbringing permeates his films. Jenkins’ Miami is not the pastel-washed playground or slapstick shoot ’em up often seen in media but a place of resilience and reflection. As a Miami native, I was transported by “Moonlight” to a Miami I had somehow yet to experience in film, a city I recognized for the first time: the rhythm of the streets, the hush of the ocean at night, the way light dances on deep-brown skin.
It’s the Miami of the overlooked, elevated to poetry.
Jenkins’ Miami is not just a backdrop; it is a character, imbued with as much complexity as the people who populate it, and he uses San Francisco to similar effect in “Medicine for Melancholy,” which follows a man and woman’s elongated one-night stand in the city.
Jenkins’ directorial style feels inherently and appropriately literary, as he’s applied it to adaptations of works by past and present literary luminaries. With “If Beale Street Could Talk,” he brings James Baldwin’s language to life with fidelity, each frame injected with the novel’s lyrical spirit. His adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, into a limited television series showcases his ability to translate historical literature into heart-wrenching, visual storytelling. It’s this literary quality—this rendering of hyper-realism through careful, deliberate crafting of language and image—that makes Jenkins’ work feel both timeless and innovative.
Then there is Jenkins’ visual style: His use of color, light, and framing elevates his films to works of art, every shadow and highlight a brushstroke on a canvas.
Barry Jenkins’ impact extends beyond his films; it’s in the conversations he sparks and the ways he challenges us to see the world anew. It’s no wonder he was tapped to direct “Mufasa: The Lion King,” where his unique vision infused classic characters and a powerhouse franchise with the same depth and artistry that define his entire body of work.
Jonathan Escoffery is the author of If I Survive You, a National Book Award nominee, a Booker Prize finalist and Miami New Times’ 2023 Best Book by a Local Author. He was named among the 36 Forces Shaping the Cultural Conversation by Harper’s Bazaar.