James Baldwin – Memphis Flyer

Kiki Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Let’s get this out of the way: If Beale Street Could Talk is not set in Memphis. It’s not about Beale Street or the blues, or loquacious rights-of-way. In fact, in the opening epigraph, author James Baldwin says Beale Street is in New Orleans.

James Baldwin may have been geographically challenged, but he was a stone cold literary genius. When he invoked Beale Street in the opening of his 1974 novel, one of the country’s first black-owned business districts existed to him as a lost world of African-American freedom. The name represented the realization of the kind of personal autonomy American capitalism always promises, but which was ultimately denied to people like Tish Rivers (Kiki Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James), two young, working-class kids from Harlem, who happen to be black.

Tish and Fonny are in love like only 19-year-olds can be. As soon as Fonny gets a new place — he’s got a crappy cold-water flat, but the budding sculptor is looking at a fixer-upper artist’s loft — he’s going to pop the question. But then Fonny gets in the mildest of street hassles, just a little pushing and shoving over Tish’s honor, and all the sudden he’s in the crosshairs of the prison-industrial complex. The racist cop he pisses off that fateful night soon gets an opportunity to frame him for a brutal rape that happened on the other side the city. With Fonny on trial for his life, it is not a good time for Tish to announce she’s pregnant.

Director Barry Jenkins has broken the rule that mediocre books make the best movies. He takes Baldwin’s dauntingly nonlinear literary structure and makes it smooth and easily understandable. Each jump forward and backward in time reveals a little bit more of the story in a way designed to maximize the emotional impact. The ending, when it comes, reveals characters who are forever changed, but unbroken.

Jenkins color sense is second to no one working today. I think he invented some new, tastefully early-70s hues especially for this movie. The film’s recreation of 1970s Harlem is flawless, and, knowing Jenkins, done efficiently. Jenkins loves to work in close up, or with his camera fixed on an effortlessly flawless composition. When his camera does move, it flows through space.

Every performance on the screen, from Layne’s heartbreakingly naive Tish, interrupted on the edge of lasting happiness, to Colman Doming bringing laughing gravitas to the role of her father, feels fully human. As Tish’s mother, Regina King puts on a one-woman Strasberg-ian acting clinic.

Regina King as Sharon Rivers

It all comes together in an emotionally epic scene where Tish and Fonny’s families grapple with the reality of a new baby on the way. If my description makes this film sound like a downer, it’s not. Tish’s family’s first reaction is to rejoice at the prospect of a new member. They know Tish and Fonny’s love is real. It’s different with Fonny’s family. His religious mother (Aunjanue Ellis, tightly wound) lashes out at the Rivers family, while the two grandads-to-be hatch plots to pay for it all. It’s a deeply humane and instantly recognizable scene that, if removed from the larger context, would be the best short film of the year.

But the tender pas de deux between Tish and Fonny, told intermittently between scenes of fear and despair, is the beating heart of the picture. Is there anyone who does romance better than Jenkins? The couple’s wide-eyed innocence, an emotion never available to the brutally repressed Charon Harris in Moonlight, is pure joy to behold. If, as Roger Ebert said, movies are machines to create empathy, then Jenkins is our greatest empathetic engineer.

Together, Baldwin and Jenkins celebrate the love that flourishes in the midst of tragedy and injustice. Jenkins came up from the indie underground, emerging from Miami in 2008 with Medicine for Melancholy and going on to win Best Picture for 2016’s Moonlight. He found the perfect material to adapt in If Beale Street Could Talk. Its examination of the human cost of the carceral state and indictment of institutions of justice that wink at racism as long as the conviction numbers stay high is, sadly, as relevant as ever.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Midway through I Am Not Your Negro, director Raoul Peck takes a moment to give us a peek at author James Baldwin’s FBI file. According to the G-Man who wrote the memo, Baldwin was a black agitator, a homosexual, and a “very dangerous individual.” By this time in the film, we have gotten to know Baldwin beyond just the usual blurb points: the guy who wrote The Fire Next Time and Notes on a Native Son, parts of which you might have had to read in school during Black History Month. The FBI is supposed to deal with murderers and criminals, and the erudite, quietly passionate man the documentary audience has seen chatting with Dick Cavett and debating at Cambridge University does not look like someone the FBI would describe as a “dangerous individual.”

But Baldwin would have instantly understood why J. Edgar Hoover’s boys were afraid of him. “The root of the white man’s rage is terror,” he says a few moments later, of a figure “who lives only his mind.”

Baldwin is a fascinating figure of the civil rights era, but in recent years he hasn’t gotten as much attention as leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. Part of that might be that he came along earlier than the others — his first novel was published in 1953, when King wasn’t even a pastor yet and Malcolm had just met Elijah Muhammad. For Baldwin, the writer’s life meant being an observer. He was neither a Christian nor a Muslim nor a member of the NAACP, but first and foremost a man of letters. Still, it was hard to maintain his objectivity in the waning days of Jim Crow. In a televised debate from the early 1960s, Baldwin found himself between Dr. King and Malcolm X as they outlined their competing visions for black liberation in America. The excerpts chosen by Peck for the documentary are extraordinary, both for the power of the two men’s personalities and the clarity with which they speak (especially in an era when a president can respond to allegations of treason with “No puppet! You’re a puppet!”). “The line that divides a witness from a participant is a fine one,” Baldwin would later say about his time in the civil rights struggle.

Both Malcolm and King would be dead before the decade was out, but Baldwin would continue to write well into the 1980s. In 1979, he wrote a 30-page outline for a book that would be called “Remember This House,” where he proposed to outline the struggle through the stories of three martyrs: King, Malcolm, and Medgar Evers. The book was never completed, but Peck took the framework, added quotes from Baldwin’s massive corpus, and layered in some choice archival footage to create I Am Not Your Negro. Samuel L. Jackson reads Baldwin’s words in something that is not quite an imitation of Baldwin, but quite different than the actor’s usual speaking voice. Jackson’s virtuosic voiceover performance is a reminder that one of America’s greatest living actors has been relegated to a caricature of himself while white actors his age still get juicy parts. This would not surprise Baldwin, who hated Stepin Fetchit and revealed to white audiences that black people disliked the Academy Award-winning 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, because they thought Sidney Poitier was “being used against them” to neuter their movement. There are choice revelations like this about every five minutes in I Am Not Your Negro.

We’re in the middle of what has been called the Golden Age of Documentary, but cultural docs have triumphed at the Oscars every year but one this decade (the exception being 2014’s Citizenfour). This year, however, an issue documentary is almost assured to win. On the race relations front, I Am Not Your Negro is nominated alongside Ava DuVernay’s 13th and OJ: Made in America, while Fire at Sea takes on the Syrian immigrant crisis in Europe. I think it’s unlikely that Academy voters will choose the refined rthymns of I Am Not Your Negro over the epic sprawl of OJ: Made in America, but that doesn’t mean that Peck’s work is less worthy. Thirty years after his death, Baldwin’s words and deeds still speak to an America that needs to listen.