“Every Nigga Is a Star”: A Critical Reflection on the Fifth Anniversary of Moonlight

Every Nigga Is a Star. Every Nigga Is a Star. (to be sung)

Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight opens with this refrain from the 1973 Boris Gar-diner hit “Every Nigger Is a Star,”¹ as Juan (played by Academy-Award-winning Mahershala Ali) rolls up in a 1973 Chevrolet Impala Custom coupe. He is immediately met by two other Black men, one a drug-dealing colleague and the other who is searching for a drug fix. The man asking for the drug hook-up turns to Juan and compliments with conviction: “you know you my man, right Juan.” To which Juan replies, “this nigga.” (Every nigga is a star.) And this 1973 refrain and homage is not a coincidence, as 1973 marks a watershed moment where a record breaking four mayors in major cities were Black. And I highlight this moment not to romanticize the nature of politics as some space of administering Black people a “way in” or a way out of anti-Blackness, but rather to speak to the affective character of the moment of heightened Black ascendency. To envelope the story of Moonlight in this symbolic register is to position Juan, Paula, Little/Black/Chiron, and every character as being as much stars in the rigorous living as Black, as those who live as stars in the spectacular sense. Jenkins’s coloring of this Floridian landscape of stars, and McCraney’s incorporation of “nigga” paints a motion picture that attempts to recognize the gross accessibility of Black stereotype as well as choosing to refuse the container of the “nigger” that has fore-closed possibilities for Black life. Moonlight, unlike its contemporary companion Brokeback Mountain, does not attempt to mark a narrative of exception or the outstanding, but rather emphasizes the perplexing and necessary truths of the pedestrian, everyday Black— its beauty, trauma, and complex truths.

Every Nigga Is a Star

This opening to the film is an invocation into the film’s Blackness, a filmic space that the late and great Manning Marable might call the representation of “the zenith and the decline.” McCraney writing this moment as the framework for all we see going forward in the film, for me, narrates a world where “every nigga really is a star.” The cinematographic emphasis on Black beauty in the film, along with the constant complexity given to each character—as you will see narrated in the great articles ahead—provides a rich terrain under which to see Black genius, excellence, creativity, and everyday rigor within scenes of high social constraint and a world of anti-Blackness. To be alive as Black, in the queerness of its frequent death, is to be a star. This gesture—recapitulating the inseparable nigga– star dialectic is not one that is about celebrity iconography, or magic if you will, but the quotidian life of Black folks, to be at once rigorously making it and shining nonetheless. There is no real glossy of this film, until we get to the water (a space inhabited by Black bodies dead and alive), to speak to the ebb and flow and flux of Blackness, speaking to Omiseke Tinsely’s claim that the “ocean obscures all origin.”² McCraney’s writerly use of Yoruba-based spirituality through water as anchor, and Jenkins’s directorial attention to the flow and flux of the ocean carrying Black bodies and things disrupts originary logics and normative constructions of Black bodies in this space as separate from the quotidian, offering instead a water source that is always a presence, an ever-active energy against which Black bodies rely and relish.

McCraney’s offering here— making “every nigga a star”—a declarative and concrete artistic statement in which there is no question to be posed to any figure who emerges within the frame of the film—extends a critical generosity that, like comedienne Monique, “always bets on us,” or in the spirit of actor and director Issa Rae “roots for everybody Black.” McCraney’s writing of this Black queer world is like Ava Duvernay, coloring our complexity through filmic portraiture and...