If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to 2016’s Moonlight, is an adaptation of a 1974 James Baldwin novel of the same name. The film tells the story of Tish and Fonny, childhood friends who slowly fall in love as young adults. Set in 1970s Harlem, Beale Street elegantly sketches the volatility and cruelty of institutional racism as it exists in the American criminal justice system. As Tish and Fonny begin to realise their life together, Fonny is falsely identified as the suspect in the rape of a Puerto Rican woman.

Beale Street was nominated for three Oscars; Regina King for best supporting actress, Barry Jenkins for best adapted screenplay, and Nicholas Britell for best original score. Of these three, King picked up the Academy Award for her role as Sharon Rivers, Tish’s heartsick mother, but any of these wins would have been more than justified. Nicholas Britell’s score in particular is a elegiac that hovers between the loss of hope, and its rediscovery. It is a truly beautiful work that builds the foundation on which the characters’ lives spin forwards. It provides a emotional and tonal reference for the film throughout.

James Laxton’s cinematography too is impressive, conveying a sensuous lullaby for the eyes. The scenes appear as if shot through gauzy film. They are dream-like and transcendental, framing the love story at the film’s centre. The film looked to photographic records of the time to evoke the period. Bruce Davidson’s ‘The Tombs’, a series of photographs shot in US prisons in 1974, provided material cues, as did Jack Garofalo’s images of 1970s Harlem (you can read about costume designer Caroline Eselin-Schaefer’s process here).

The performances are strong throughout. From Kiki Layne’s subtle grit, to Colman Domingo’s rangy bluster. Brian Tyree Henry, in a small role as an old friend recently released from prison, delivers a devastating foreshadowing of Fonny’s arrest. It’s a crucial and stunning performance.

Beyond its quality as a work of excellent film-making, Beale Street also functions as a commentary on inequality. The film presents us with real lives to flesh out statistics which detail the disproportionate impact of imprisonment on African American men. Michelle Alexander’s recent work, The New Jim Crow, gives a compelling account of this phenomena. Alexander outlines the tragedy by numbers of the disproportionate harms experienced by African American communities in an era of mass incarceration. If Beale Street Could Talk, in a way, presents a fantasy of survival under such an unforgiving regime. The film is a torturous journey, continually heaping the weight of the future on the viewer as it moves inevitably towards Fonny’s arrest. The somber fact is that it is an exceptional case of love unbroken by adversity. As Baldwin wrote his novel, he clearly saw the threat of encroaching over-policing and differential criminal justice responses. But it is difficult to know if Baldwin could have foreseen how surely American political choices would inflict heavy losses on these communities.

It is now impossible to watch Beale Street without something verging on despair for the maturation of these policies in the contemporary era. The film brings to mind the recent case of Kalief Browder, first publicised by Jennifer Gonnerman in The New Yorker. Kalief’s story stands as a harrowing example of these political choices as they exist in the 21st century. Browder was 16 when he was arrested for the theft of a backpack. The court set a bail amount which Browder’s family could not afford to pay. Instead of bail, then, Kalief was remanded to custody pending trial. Three years later, he was finally released. Ultimately, there had been no trial. The backpack owner could not be found, and there was insufficient evidence. Kalief was released, after spending three years (much of it in solitary confinement) in New York’s Riker’s Island prison. Gonnerman’s piece first drew attention to Kalief’s case, but his torture continued after his release. In 2015, unable to overcome the abuse he had experienced in prison, Kalief Browder took his own life.

The case of Kalief Browder is a harrowing echo of the narrative in Beale Street, with only the latter holding out the redeeming possibility of love.

If Beale Street Could Talk is a beautiful piece of film-making. It presents a delicate story of love and loss, and love again. It stands as both elegy and warning, and argues for hope in a time of hopelessness.

4/5