if beale street could talk james baldwin movie

One day 19-year-old Tish (newcomer Kiki Layne) realizes that her childhood friend Alonzo (Stephan James), whom everyone calls “Fonny,” is in love with her. That same mix of triumph and tragedy dominates If Beale Street Could Talk. But whole sections were razed in the same period, rendering it a virtual ghost town. By an Act of Congress, it was named the “Home of the Blues” in 1977. A center of black life and culture, it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966. Memphis’s Beale Street is a place of triumph and tragedy. Handy’s song “ Beale Street Blues” and because, as the film’s epigraph quotes Baldwin saying, “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, born in the black neighborhood of some American city, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. The title of Baldwin’s 1974 New York-set novel evokes a significant street in Memphis, both as a reference to W.C. “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street” But it’s nonetheless hard not to fall under If Beale Street Could Talk’s somber, lustrous spell. It’s a beautiful, lyrical film, at times feeling (as Moonlight did) like a tone poem or a lyrical plaint: though Jenkins’s filmmaking is near-perfect and the film’s images are indelible, without Baldwin’s prose it may scan more as a series of vignettes than a narrative feature film.

And then conflict takes over - not from inside their relationship, but pressing in from the outside world. If Beale Street Could Talk applies that approach to 1970s New York City, centering on a young black couple who grew up together, then fell in love.

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If beale street could talk james baldwin movie