if beale street could talk james baldwin movie

But before they can, a young Puerto Rican woman falsely accuses Fonny of rape, and he’s hauled away to jail to face what we and the characters gradually recognize as an increasingly insurmountable miscarriage of justice involving a lying cop and a legal system that’d rather keep Fonny locked away than pursue the more difficult truth. Tish and her sister, Ernestine ( Teyonah Parris), are more modern: well-raised, hard-working women who nevertheless curse in front of their parents.įonny and Tish are eager to get married. Fonny’s mother is extremely devout, as are his sisters. Tish (newcomer KiKi Layne), 19, and Fonny ( Stephan James), 22, were once childhood playmates-chubby, laughing babes taking baths together, being raised alongside one another, despite yawning differences between their families’ social and religious beliefs. It’s a lush, courageous black melodrama set in 1970s New York, a story about love defying injustice-or trying its damndest to. Now comes If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins’s extraordinary adaptation of James Baldwin’s soulful 1974 novel. Its endgame isn’t sex, or even necessarily sexuality, but something even more rare in movies: pure, loving intimacy between black men, sexual and not.

Moonlight, his wonderful follow-up and 2016 best-picture winner, is a coming-of-age story about a fatherless queer boy set among the impoverished Miami neighborhoods that were once home to Jenkins himself. His 2008 debut, Medicine for Melancholy, chronicled a one-night stand turned burgeoning romance in a maddeningly gentrifying San Francisco. Barry Jenkins makes movies about black love.

If beale street could talk james baldwin movie