When Moonlight (2016) won the Academy Award for Best Picture, it wasn’t just a win for indie cinema or for stories that center marginalized voices. It was a triumph of screenwriting—proof that stories can be small in scope but monumental in emotional weight, and that intersectionality, when handled with subtlety and care, can elevate a narrative beyond its genre boundaries.
In this post, we’re going to explore how Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight—based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue—integrates the concept of intersectionality into its screenwriting, and how writers can learn from its techniques when developing characters, themes, and structure.
What is Intersectionality?
Before diving into Moonlight, it’s important to clarify what we mean by intersectionality. Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality describes how different aspects of a person’s identity—such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and more—intersect to create unique experiences of discrimination and privilege.
In storytelling, intersectionality isn’t just about including diverse characters. It’s about layering those identities in a way that reflects the complex ways in which people live. And that’s exactly what Moonlight does.
The Character as Intersectional Lens: Chiron’s Three Lives
Moonlight is divided into three chapters: “Little,” “Chiron,” and “Black.” Each presents a different stage in the protagonist’s life. These chapters aren’t just chronological—they’re emotional evolutions of a single character navigating race, masculinity, sexuality, and poverty all at once.
- Little (Childhood): We see Chiron as a quiet, bullied child in Liberty City, Miami. His mother is addicted to drugs. He doesn’t yet have language for his queerness, but we sense his difference. Here, intersectionality appears in the quiet violence of his surroundings—he is poor, Black, and beginning to be marked as queer, all of which render him vulnerable.
- Chiron (Adolescence): In high school, Chiron is lanky, awkward, and increasingly isolated. His sexuality is more defined, and he begins to experience both desire and trauma. His Blackness, masculinity, and queerness are now colliding with intensity. The bullying intensifies. The expectations of how a young Black man “should” behave close in.
- Black (Adulthood): Chiron has reinvented himself as “Black,” a hardened version of himself with a muscular frame, grillz, and the posturing of a drug dealer. He has embraced a performance of hypermasculinity as armor. But when he reconnects with Kevin, an old friend, we see that his identity is still fractured and unresolved.
By segmenting Chiron’s life into three acts, Jenkins and McCraney create a triptych of identity. Each act explores how the same intersecting forces affect him differently at different stages of life—shaping his body, behavior, and relationships.
Subverting Tropes: Queerness in Black Masculinity
One of the film’s most powerful achievements is how it subverts expectations around Black masculinity. Popular media often flattens Black male characters into stereotypes—aggressive, emotionally closed, hypersexual, or absent altogether. Moonlight pushes back against these.
Chiron is gentle, vulnerable, and quiet. His queerness is never exploited or reduced to plot mechanics. His desire is intimate, not explicit. When he finally kisses Kevin on the beach, the moment is not just about sexual awakening—it’s about emotional recognition, about being seen.
In screenwriting terms, Jenkins makes a bold choice here: he lets silence carry weight. Dialogue is sparse. Chiron doesn’t explain himself. We feel his inner life through image, composition, and subtle cues. Intersectionality is not something the characters name. It’s embedded in the storytelling.
Environment as Identity: Setting and Social Context
Liberty City, Miami is more than just a backdrop—it’s a character in its own right, shaping and reflecting the forces at work in Chiron’s life. The neighborhood is marked by poverty, crime, and systemic neglect. But Jenkins never romanticizes or demonizes it. He presents it with empathy and specificity.
The screenplay roots intersectionality in social realism. For instance:
- Chiron’s mother, Paula, is both a victim and perpetrator of pain. She is addicted, emotionally abusive, and yet deeply wounded herself. Her character complicates the “bad mother” trope by showing how cycles of trauma and structural inequality impact her life.
- Juan, the drug dealer who becomes a father figure, offers one of the most surprising portrayals in the film. His tenderness toward Chiron challenges both the archetype of the criminal and the idea that masculinity cannot include caregiving.
The intersections of gender, race, and class here aren’t just thematic—they’re dramatized through character choices and relationships.
Structural Choices: A Triptych in Time
From a screenwriting perspective, Moonlight breaks traditional structure in quiet, radical ways. There’s no traditional rising action or climax. Instead, we get three almost standalone stories, each echoing the last.
This episodic structure mirrors Chiron’s fractured identity. Each chapter ends before emotional closure is possible. The ellipses between the acts ask us to fill in the emotional and psychological gaps ourselves.
It’s a lesson in trusting your audience—a screenwriter’s superpower when used with intention.
- The decision not to show Chiron’s transformation from bullied teen to adult dealer is bold. Instead, we infer the pain that caused it.
- The final scene between adult Chiron and Kevin is quiet, unresolved, and emotionally potent. It doesn’t “solve” Chiron’s intersectional identity; it sits with the complexity of it.
As a screenwriting tool, the structure enacts intersectionality. It resists linearity. It resists simplicity. It forces us to reckon with the multiplicity of identity.
Empathy Over Exposition
One of Moonlight’s most celebrated qualities is its emotional resonance. That resonance isn’t achieved through exposition—it’s earned through empathy. Jenkins and McCraney’s script lets us feel intersectionality rather than telling us what it is.
This is a screenwriting lesson worth underlining: Don’t explain your themes. Embody them.
For example:
- We never hear Chiron label himself as gay or queer.
- There’s no speech about what it means to be Black and soft in a hard world.
- Instead, we see how Chiron watches others. How his body tightens in fear. How his eyes search for recognition.
The screenplay invites us into the spaces between words. It gives us subtext that’s rich with cultural weight and unspoken longing.
The Power of Collaboration: McCraney and Jenkins
It’s also important to acknowledge the collaboration behind Moonlight. Tarell Alvin McCraney and Barry Jenkins were both born in Liberty City. They were both grappling with similar questions of identity, queerness, and place.
Their lived experiences informed the story, but their artistry shaped how it was told. McCraney’s theatrical roots and Jenkins’ visual lyricism created a synthesis of stage and screen that allowed for intimacy and abstraction in equal measure.
Writers should take note: when telling stories that reflect intersectional experiences, collaboration can bring richness and accountability. Lived experience matters—but so does craft.
Lessons for Screenwriters
If you’re developing a script that engages with intersectionality, Moonlight offers several takeaways:
- Let complexity live in your characters. Avoid flattening identity into checkboxes or monologues.
- Use structure to reflect theme. Chiron’s triptych journey mirrors his fragmented sense of self.
- Lean into silence. Don’t be afraid to let the audience feel discomfort or ambiguity.
- Embed identity in every layer. From setting to costume to gesture, let every detail contribute to the whole.
- Challenge stereotypes with care. Subvert them, yes—but ground your characters in truth, not defiance alone.
Final Thoughts: A Blueprint for the Future
Moonlight is more than just a film about a Black gay man. It’s a story about what it means to be unseen, to build armor around softness, to search for connection in a world that punishes divergence.
Its brilliance lies not just in its message, but in how the message is delivered—through a screenplay that is layered, patient, and radically humane. For screenwriters interested in exploring intersectional identities, Moonlight is not just inspiration—it’s a blueprint.
As the industry continues to evolve and include more voices, the lessons of Moonlight remind us that the most powerful stories aren’t the ones that shout, but the ones that listen deeply—to character, to context, and to the quiet intersections of identity.
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