Adapting Genius

Moonlight filmmaker Barry Jenkins makes aJames Baldwin classic all too timely

- Eliza Berman

BARRY JENKINS DOESN’T JUST LOVE James Baldwin—he calls the 20th century literary lion his “personal school of life.” But Baldwin’s work was long out of reach for storytellers like him because the writer’s family has been, since his death in 1987, reluctant to grant the rights to adapt his work.

Not so any longer. This month Jenkins brings to the screen an adaptation of Baldwin’s 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, marking the first English-language film based on one of the author’s published works. It would be easy to assume that Jenkins received the keys to the Baldwin kingdom thanks to the Best Picture statue his 2016 drama, Moonlight, won at the 89th Academy Awards. But Jenkins, who discovered Baldwin in college at the urging of an ex-girlfriend, had already adapted Beale Street well before Moonlight was filmed—without knowing whether he’d be able to secure the rights. Baldwin’s family, on the strength of that screenplay and Jenkins’ sole featurelength credit—his 2008 debut, Medicine for Melancholy, made for only $15,000— took a risk of their own and said yes.

It paid off. Jenkins’ adaptation, which stars KiKi Layne and Stephan James as Tish and Fonny, soul mates kept apart by a rotten, racist criminal-justice system as they await the birth of their child, has met with shimmering reviews and already begun collecting honors, in particular for Jenkins’ screenplay and a supporting turn by Regina King as Tish’s mother.