Moon Man

An unlikely heartthrob emerges from Moonlight, the soul-stirring film everyone’s talking about.

- Melanie Mignucci

Ashton Sanders speaks from the heart. When he gets along with someone, they “vibe it out”; clothes he likes, he “f*cks with.” Yet when asked about the film Moonlight, in which he stars, devastatingly, as the 16-year-old Chiron, the actor switches to a quietly tender mode of speech. On auditioning, he says his “soul connected with the story line”; the scenes in which Chiron is bullied make his “heart super vulnerable and raw.” (Ashton himself was bullied as a kid.)

His ability to harmonize two contrasting vibes makes him the standout of a breathtaking film. Told in three acts, Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins, follows Chiron’s  coming of age in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Miami with an absent father and a crack-addicted mother. As he grows up, Chiron, played as a kid by Alex Hibbert and as an adult by Trevante Rhodes, negotiates his changing relationship to masculinity through different male role models.