Even more visually lyrical than Moonlight, the saturated colour palette of Beale Street recalls Douglas Sirk's Technicolour-soaked melodramas. From Laxton's vibrant cinematography to Caroline Eselin's colour coordinated costume design (just look at all the yellow in the opening scene - in both the photography and the wardrobe), everything we see rings true, like a Jack Garofalo photograph come to life. Aesthetically, much like Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk looks amazing. With this as the central framework, the story is told in a non-linear style, jumping back and forth from one time period to another, which has an important thematic effect that I'll discuss below. Ecstatic at the news, Fonny says he can't be in prison when the baby is born, and so Tish and her family determine to do anything it takes to get him out as soon as possible. Awaiting his trial, Tish visits him in jail, telling him she is pregnant. However, when he is accused of rape, the victim mistakenly identifies him in a line-up, and he is charged and detained. Fonny has quit his job working for a furniture manufacturer, hoping instead to make it as a sculptor. New York, 1974 19-year old Clementine 'Tish' Rivers ( KiKi Layne) and 22-year old Alonzo 'Fonny' Hunt ( Stephan James), who have known one another since they were children, have fallen in love, and are planning to get married and raise a family. However, what reads beautifully in the novel is badly out of place in the film, even in voiceover, and has the effect of rendering the two central characters completely unrealistic, with their love for one another idealised to such an extent as to become ridiculous.

Employing a Terrence Malick-esque esoteric voiceover, Jenkins lifts entire passages directly from Baldwin. The biggest problem is the somnolent love story. However, although I found it aesthetically faultless, much like Moonlight, I felt the totality was considerably less than the sum of its exceptional parts. At a quick glance, this should be a masterpiece - there's the foundation of James Baldwin, arguably the most significant African-American author of all time, and this is the first English-language adaptation of one of his novels there's writer/director Barry Jenkins, fresh off the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016) there's a theme that is (sadly) almost as pertinent now as it was in 1974 there's James Laxton's extraordinarily vibrant cinematography there's a bevvy of hugely talented actors there's Nicholas Britell's absorbing and melancholy score. Based on James Baldwin's 1974 novel of the same name, If Beale Street Could Talk is really two stories in one there's the love story at the narrative's core, giving the film much of its tonal qualities, and on the surface, there's a socio-political protest, which provides most of the main plot points.

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