From If Beale Street Could Talk
Kiki Layne debuts her screen acting career as Tish Rivers in If Beale Street Could Talk, a film adapted from James Baldwin’s book of the same name.
In the Netflix racial satire series Dear White People, a black character quotes “Baldwin” to a white person, saying “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” The clueless caucasian is impressed by the profundity of “Alec Baldwin.”
The quotation, of course, is from James Baldwin, who made the comment during a 1961 WBAI interview with Nat Hentoff. Born 1924 in Harlem, Baldwin became the prophetic voice of black literature, expressing African American angst, anger, and aspirations in novels like his semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, and in essays like The Fire Next Time, published in 1963.
But, although Baldwin is heralded as an American icon, none of the prolific writer’s fiction has ever been adapted into a U.S.-made, theatrically released feature film—until now.
If Beale Street Could Talk is an adaptation of Baldwin’s fifth novel, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, who was nominated for best director and scored a screenwriting Oscar for 2016’s Moonlight, which also won the Academy Award for best picture. Like Baldwin—who boldly wrote openly about same-sex relationships, like in his 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room—Jenkins is gay and black.
Beale Street, just nominated for a Golden Globe, is actually about a young Harlem heterosexual couple: nineteen-year-old Tish (Kiki Layne, who co-stars in a 2019 film adaptation of another classic, Richard Wright’s Native Son) and twenty-two-year-old Fonny (Stephan James, who co-stars in the Homecoming Amazon series and portrayed the African American icons Jesse Owens in 2016’s Race and John Lewis in 2014’s Selma).
Tish becomes pregnant and her parents are overjoyed. Sharon, her mother, is portrayed with steely determination by Regina King (who had a similar role in the American Crime TV series). Colman Domingo (Rev. Ralph Abernathy in Selma and co-star of the 2016 Nat Turner slave revolt epic The Birth of a Nation) warmly plays Tish’s loving father Joseph. But before Fonny and Tish can marry, something dreadful befalls them.
Published fourteen years after To Kill a Mockingbird, Baldwin’s 1974 Beale Street has a plot point strikingly similar to Harper Lee’s beloved masterpiece: Like Tom Robinson in the former, Fonny is falsely charged with rape. However, the accuser in Beale Street is Puerto Rican, not white. More significantly, while Lee’s Alabama protagonists are the white southerners Atticus and Scout, in Baldwin’s Harlem and Greenwich Village-set novel, the main characters are black.
The terror and outrage of everyday racism experienced by ordinary people simply trying to live their lives in a white supremacist America.
Tish’s family believes in Fonny’s innocence, and his father Frank (Michael Beach, Aquaman) also supports liberating Fonny, but his wife Sheila (Dominique Thorne), who is described as a “holy roller,” along with her holier-than-thou daughters spurn him because he and Tish are poor and having a baby out of wedlock.
The white attorney Hayward (Finn Wittrock, 2015’s The Big Short) is Beale Street’s counterpart to Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch. Moved by the injustice of Fonny’s case and the plight of the separated lovers expecting a baby, the young liberal lawyer fights for his client.
How faithful in spirit and letter is Jenkins’ screen adaptation of Baldwin’s novel? In terms of sensibility and style he gives form to Baldwin’s often free flowing book, which sometimes verges on stream of consciousness. Jenkins telescopes the scope of the action and characters, intercutting and cross cutting the narrative and uses flashbacks.
Jenkins’ hones pretty closely to the plot of Baldwin’s novel as he translates from the medium of the page to the screen. Baldwin could write in an elliptical manner and his metaphorical finale is admittedly subject to interpretation. However, Baldwin purists may find the newly minted ending Jenkins’ has conjured up to be very eyebrow-raising.
But in the end, Jenkins imbues Beale Street with the terror and outrage of everyday racism experienced by ordinary people simply trying to live their lives in a white supremacist America. The injustice and oppression Baldwin captured in his 1974 novel remain all too relevant today.
A scene where Fonny is rapping with his old friend Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry of the FX series Atlanta and Broadway musical The Book of Mormon), an ex-con, incorporates his dialogue from the novel: “Man, this country really do not like niggers . . . I’m really going to have to try to figure out some way of getting some bread together and getting out of this fucking country.” Baldwin was rather famously an expatriate who lived much of his life abroad. By 1948 he’d relocated to Paris and in 1970 he moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the South of France, where he wrote Beale Street.
Although this is the first U.S. motion picture adaptation of a Baldwin novel, there was a French version of Beale Street produced in 1998 called Where the Heart Is. In 1963 there was a TV adaptation of Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country which co-starred Joseph Wiseman (who played the title character in the first James Bond movie, 1962’s Dr. No).
And the American Playhouse TV series adapted Baldwin’s first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1985, with Paul Winfield, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Ving Rhames, CCH Pounder and Alfre Woodard. In 2016 Raoul Peck expanded and adapted Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, directing the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.
Baldwin took his title from the 1912 song “Beale Street Blues” composed by the so-called “Father of the Blues” songwriter W.C. Handy. Located in Memphis, Tennessee, Beale Street was an African American entertainment district with deep resonance in black culture and life. Baldwin’s novel, and now Jenkins’s movie, bear witness to the persecution of African Americans, and allow “Beale Street”—that is black America—to talk and have its say.
If Beale Street Could Talk opens Dec. 14 in New York and Los Angeles and opens nationwide December 25.