Sensitive but strong most of the way, Moonlight turns soft at the end. But its tight focus on the punishment awaiting gay youth in black culture is original and bold. This makes it an Oscar contender.

Although Barry Jenkins is listed as both director and screenwriter, he was using material that had been written about by playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, who became very involved in the filming. McCraney, who is gay and, like Jenkins, grew up in Miami’s Liberty City, admits that the film dramatises his own sexual identity conflicts while growing up.

The story of the lead character, Chiron, uses three different actors: at ages eight, fifteen and twenty-five (my approximation, as exact age is not specified). The character of Kevin, his friend, also uses three actors; but the main focus of the film is on Chiron.

Right off, it should be mentioned – and this is a very deliberate choice by the filmmakers – that no white people appear in the film.

The film opens by introducing us to Juan, a strong, compassionate man who happens to be a successful Miami drug dealer (Mahershala Ali is mesmerizing in the role). He discover Chiron, who is hiding from bullies, and tries to help him. Chiron, is frail  – he’s known as “Little” to the street kids – and painfully shy. He refuses to even speak, but finally does talk, very tentatively, to Teresa, Juan’s girlfriend. Juan then takes Chiron home and meets his mother, Paula (brilliantly played by Naomie Harris, who is the only actor in all three episodes). A crack addict, she horribly neglects Chiron, but resents Juan’s efforts to befriend her son. Still, Juan and Teresa manage to build a supportive relationship with the boy, who finds care and shelter at Teresa’s home when he needs to escape his mother’s abuse. The most lyrically expressive scene in the film is when Juan teaches Chiron to swim at the beach.

The first episode concludes, powerfully, in a scene where Chiron, Juan and Teresa are seated at her kitchen table. The child Chiron asks Juan what a “faggot” is. The answer is awkward and evasive. Then he asks Juan if he is selling drugs to his mother, and Juan confirms, with quiet shame. Chiron’s reaction vividly reveals an important aspect of his character, one that explains much about the choices he makes later.

Chiron’s friend Kevin has a crucial scene in this first episode. He confronts Chiron about why he lets himself be bullied. Then he pulls him to the ground, where they wrestle vigorously. Kevin stands, and helps Chiron get up. “See,” he says,”I knew you weren’t soft”.

In the second episode, however, when the boys are about fifteen, they have two meetings that have a much greater effect on Chiron’s life. In the first, Chiron becomes aware of the nature of his sexual identity for the first time. But in the second, Kevin becomes an instrument in Chiron’s continued humiliation, and this leads to an act of violence that sets the stage for the third, and final, episode of the film.

This final episode, where the adult Chiron, now called “Black”, has made an independent life for himself in Atlanta, is the most controversial with critics and audiences. He is almost unrecognizable at first, with a physique of imposing physical power. But, especially in a scene where he visits Paula at a rehab center near Miami, we recognize that the same boy is in the man: quiet, sensitive and suspicious. Trevante Rhodes and Naomie Harris are both wonderful here, but the scene wouldn’t have worked if Jenkins had gone for easy emotional effects and hadn’t stayed true to his talents. He had selected all of the actors because of their ability to express their inner feelings with a minimum of dialogue.

Most of the final episode, however, depicts Chiron’s first face-to-face meeting with Kevin in many years. It is set up almost casually, but it reveals how each man has tried, unsuccessfully, to adopt some semblance of a sexual identity for himself without having to confront unresolved issues between them.

Whatever your opinion of the rest of the film, the ending is not dramatically satisfying. While some viewers have accepted the semblance of closure between the two men, I think more was necessary to get to that point. Certainly it fails to take us to the depths of Chiron’s self-loathing, or to give us hope that he was ready to acknowledge it. The episode is also the most set-bound and visually static of the three, betraying its theatrical origins.

Still, Jenkins shows remarkable skill in handling such sensitive material. And his riskiest choice – namely to eliminate white people from the film altogether – proved smart because it sharpened the main theme of the story: that one’s own culture can so dominate our lives as to force us to deny what is most natural about ourselves. That focus allowed Jenkins to follow a small set of characters, at a leisurely pace, and maintain interest and suspense based on the truth of their relationships, and not to have to jig up melodrama using stereotypes, white or black. And it’s also why I don’t read it as any denial of the effects of racism by Jenkins; that’s simply not the story he wanted to tell here.

The frequent use of hand-held cinematography – James Laxton is the exceptional photographer -intensifies the sense of intimacy, especially when Chiron is a child. We can relate to a frightened, impressionable boy who finds the world confusing, and often hostile. Jenkins is just as confident with Chiron’s adolescence, where the boy discovers how to confront the even greater hostility reserved for black males who fail to present an acceptable image in a homophobic culture. If Jenkins disappoints in resolving the story, it’s partly because Chiron and Kevin have already become so real to us that we care about what happens to them. And that is no small achievement.