I used the adverb kaleidoscopically above for his work is a twisting wave of visuals, colors and sound. More determined to clear Fonny’s name is Tish’s fierce mother Sharon (Regina King in her Academy Award-winning performance), willing to to put herself at risk on the couple’s behalf – even if it means traveling to Puerto Rico on an almost impossible mission.īarry Jenkins is an evocative cinematic poet. While Fonny’s mother and sisters condemn the relationship and the birth of a baby to an unmarried couple, Tish has the steadfast support of her father and her sister Ernestine. Tish knows that Fonny is innocent, and is mindful that his good friend Daniel Carty has only recently been freed after an unjust incarceration and the scars of his experience are unbearable. Kaleidoscopically, we will find out that she’s pregnant – and that Fonny is in jail – wrongly arrested for a crime he did not commit.

Her narrative – just like memory – is not linear. It tells the story of Tish as she’s vibrantly recalling the strong bond between her and her artist fiancé Alonzo “Fonny” – whom she’s known since they were both toddlers. “Every Black person in America was born on Beale Street, born in the Black neighborhood of some American city, whether in Jackson Mississippi, or in Harlem,” are Baldwin’s words that open the film. Baldwin’s books have been adapted for television and overseas, his vivid and essential representations of African-American life had not been done by an American filmmaker prior to this movie. The novel came out towards the end of the Black Arts Movement which started in 1965 and through art and activism delivered a message of Black pride. He published his novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” in 1974, and it was his first work to focus on a Black couple’s love story – as well as the only one to be narrated by a woman.

His writing grapples with his place as a black man in the United States, and he details the injustices and the contradictions in American life. James Baldwin – the American writer and activist and one of the most important authors of the last century – explored the racial and sexual divide in our country. This spectacularly lyrical and lush follow up to “Moonlight” – is at times painful but leaves you inebriated with the optimistic pronunciation that love can get you through the most difficult of times. The couple’s as well as the family’s love that envelops around them is the unifying force that binds them together against the bigotry toward African Americans in 70s Harlem. Trust in it all the way,” says Sharon – the mother of Tish – one of the lovers at the center of “If Beale Street Could Talk” – the transfixing and timeless romance based on the classic novel by James Baldwin and adapted and directed by the Academy Award winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins.

If beale street could talk book cover