Butler's Cinema Scene

Stephan James and Kiki Layne

“IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK” My rating: B+

119 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Barry Jenkins’ followup to “Moonlight” begins with a God’s-eye view of a young couple walking hand in hand.

This impossibly handsome pair are Tish (Kiki Layne), age 19, and Fonny (Stephan James), 20, African American New Yorkers in the early 1970s.  They’ve been friends since childhood, but are  thinking of taking their relationship to a new physical level.

“Are you ready for this?”

“I’ve been ready for this my whole life.”

“If Beale Street Could Talk,” based on the 1974 novel by James Baldwin (incredibly, the first of his many works to receive big-screen dramatization), is a deeply affecting love story. But that’s just the starting point.

Baldwin used the Tish/Fonny relationship and its many hurdles to comment on the place of black folk in America. The relationship of two young people in love is simultaneously an indictment of societal evil.

Jenkins’ screenplay, like the novel, centers on Fonny’s arrest on a trumped-up rape charge, a development that shatters the joy that otherwise would be unleashed by Tish’s revelation that she’s pregnant. The film’s time-jumping narrative zaps between the couple’s life together and their separation as Fonny awaits trial.

All this is told in a series of beautifully acted scenes that isolate key moments in the lives of the characters. One of these is a gathering of the couple’s families for the announcement of the pregnancy.

Tish’s parents, Sharon and Joseph (Regina King, Colman Domingo), are hugely supportive. So is Fonny’s garrulous father, Frank (Michael Beach).  But Fonny’s mother (Aunjanue Ellis) is a sanctimonious harpy who all but damns the baby in the womb and curses Tish for leading her boy astray.

In another scene Fonny shares a few beers with an old buddy, Daniel (Bryan Tyree Henry), just out of prison for a car theft he didn’t commit.  They reminisce,  joke, but eventually the talk turns to incarceration.

“They were just playing with me,” Daniel says of the justice system, still trembling from the memories. “When you go in there they can do whatever they want to you. And they dogs, man. The white man has got to be the devil.”

Funny responds with sympathy and bitterness: “This country really do not like niggers, man.”

Such moments may strike some as heavy handed, yet they are essential to Baldwin’s purpose. Not that “Beale Street…” is just a case of reverse racism.  There are admirable white folk here.

Like the  young Jewish landlord (Dave Franco) willing to rent out a loft to Tish and Fonny because — well, because he’s open minded and a sucker for love.  Or the restaurant manager (Diego Luna) who takes the young pair under his culinary wing.  Not to mention the young white lawyer (Finn Wittrock) who takes on Honny’s case knowing there little likelihood of either an acquittal or a fat retainer.

Of course the decency of these characters is offset by the pure evil of Bell (Ed Skrein), a racist cop who frames Fonny for the pure meanness of it. While most of the characters are portrayed in three dimensions, this heavy is little more than a tumor in blue.

Though the odds are stacked against them, Fonny and Tish’s kin organize a defense.  The fathers, Frank and Joseph, take to pilfering goods from their jobs in the garment district, fencing them to pay a lawyer. And Sharon has the unenviable task of flying to Puerto Rico to track down the young rape victim (Emily Rios) in a effort to get her return to New York to drop the charges against Fonny.

All of this is masterfully handled by Jenkins (whose “Moonlight” earned best picture and adapted screenplay Oscar honors), who finds just the right balance between realism and visual/aural poetry.

“If Beale Street…” is lyrical and haunting, gritty and glowing, elating and crushing.

A lot like life.

| Robert W. Butler