How a $15,000 Movie Rallied a New Generation of Black Auteurs
By Reggie Ugwu
It’s not so hard to find them now. But nearly 10 years ago, when they appeared in “Medicine for Melancholy,” the first film by the “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins, characters like Micah and Jo’ — young, black, financially overdrawn but rolling in polished pop culture references — were, if not exactly unicorns, a protected species, rare enough to be worthy of tapping the person next to you and spreading the word.
Aimless and anxious 20-somethings in popular culture were nothing new, of course. But they tended to be monochromatic, as if early-onset ennui and the shallow comforts of art snobbery were the exclusive inventions of white people.
So cinephiles at the time took note when, seemingly out of nowhere, came a convincing counternarrative in the form of “Medicine.” It followed Micah and Jo’, a would-be couple whose one-night stand stretched fitfully into two, as they walked and biked around an artfully desaturated San Francisco, waxing on about indie rock and Barbara Loden in one breath, and black identity, the politics of interracial relationships and gentrification in the next.
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With Jenkins’s third film, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” due next month, the people who made “Medicine” as well as prominent admirers — including Lena Waithe (“Master of None,” “The Chi”), Justin Simien (“Dear White People”) and Terence Nance (“Random Acts of Flyness”) — discussed its outsize legacy and quiet influence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/movies/medicine-for-melancholy-black-auteurs.html
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