A revealing search for identity

Tender and tough, Moonlight stays with you.

To understand Chiron, the main character in director Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, it might be helpful to understand what this young man -- shown at three different stages of his life and played by three different actors -- doesn't have.

No father guides Chiron; his crack-addicted, single mom offers no real parental support; no group of friends provides companionship; and no protector helps keep the neighborhood bullies at bay.

Such observations make Chiron sound like a sociological statistic, a black kid suffering the deprivations of an impoverished life in Miami's ironically named Liberty City. Although Chiron's deprivations constitute a valid and appropriate description, they don't go far enough.

The most important thing that Chiron lacks is a voice. What makes Jenkins's movie impressive are the ways in which he has coaxed the actors who play Chiron to be expressive without articulating the myriad contradictory feelings that whirl inside the character's head. Chiron seldom speaks.

You can (and probably should) spend time unpacking the various complex meanings in Jenkins's movie: the drug dealer who becomes a genuine father figure in Chiron's life but who, because he sells drugs to Chiron's mother, is pained by his own hypocrisy; Chiron's discovery of his gayness; or the multiplicity of causes leading to the violent explosion that criminalizes Chiron and redirects his life.

All of those things are worth discussing, but Chiron's voicelessness underlies everything worth thinking about in Moonlight.

And by voice, I don't mean only the act of speaking. I mean Chiron's ability to define an identity that's unshackled from environment and circumstance.

In the movie's first section, we meet the youngest version of Chiron, as played by Alex Hibbert. A slight kid who has been issued the nickname "Little," Chiron clearly is an outsider.

In this section, Chiron encounters Juan (a terrific Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who takes the boy under wing.

Born in Cuba, Juan sincerely cares about Chiron. Scenes in which he teaches Chiron to swim give Jenkins an opportunity to display a tender, lovely touch.

Not surprisingly, Juan's concerns land him in a territorial fight with Chiron's mother, a walking fury of woman portrayed by Naomie Harris.

When Chiron reaches his teen years, Ashton Sanders takes over the role. Of the three actors who portray Chiron, Sanders has the least physical resemblance to the others, but his acting leaves no doubt about the adolescent Chiron's connection to his boyhood self: his watchfulness, his ability to ask penetrating questions, his loneliness.

In this period, Chiron has his first sexual experience, and again tries to escape bullies. He hides from his tormentors until an irrepressible anger breaks through his muted surface.

Trevante Rhodes takes over the role when Chiron becomes an adult. By this time, Chiron has survived a stint in juvenile prison; he has bulked up, perhaps to armor himself against the world and against his own feelings. He's also living a life that mirrors the life lived by Juan.

I don't know if it's acting or physical resemblance or a combination of the two, but as this segment evolves, Rhodes reveals more and more traces of the Chiron we knew as a child.

Eventually, Chiron reconnects with a friend from childhood (Andre Holland), a reunion that leads to the movie's conclusion -- which feels like a well-earned respite from all the previous tensions, if not a triumphant moment of self-realization.

Whether you see Moonlight as a perfect movie or not, it's difficult to imagine that you won't be moved by the way Jenkins interprets and reimagines Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.

It's not easy to make a movie in which the main character is less actor than one who's acted upon, less talker than one who is talked at, but Jenkins creates a richly realized world and moves us through it with insight and small moments of grace.

Don't look for equity on Wall Street

A drama that takes a look at women in the world of high finance.

When it comes to the pursuit of money, we probably shouldn't be surprised that people have a tendency to behave badly.

The new movie Equity is full of people who act as if such bad behavior constitutes a form of obligatory service, mostly because they're focused only on serving their own interests.

But Equity isn't a typical Wall Street movie that takes aim at greed by penetrating the environs of a big-time investment bank as it watches the characters try to smash each other to bits.

Instead, it's a telling look at problems women face as they're absorbed into a business that once was a preserve for men only. The women in Equity are smart and strong, but they're subject to problems that the men in similar positions don't face, being hit on by clients who they can't afford to offend, for example.

Working with a fine cast, director Meera Menon has made a thought-provoking drama that centers on Naomi (Anna Gunn), a powerful woman who's trying to recover from a bad professional experience. An IPO that Naomi was handling went bad, something that hasn't helped her chances for advancement at her firm.

Much rides on Anna's launch of Cache, a buzz-worthy company that provides Internet security and seems destined to become one of the year's hottest new stocks.

Confident and competent, Naomi has a no-nonsense approach that fits her job, but she's up against many obstacles: an ambitious assistant (Sarah Megan Thomas) of questionable loyalty and an equally ambitious prosecutor (Alysia Reiner) who's looking into the activities of Naomi's lover (James Purefoy) -- not to mention an insufferable client (Samuel Roukin) who believes his wallet should grow to match his ego in size.

Thomas' character, by the way, is pregnant, a condition that the movie presents as a clear liability among high-stakes business people who are jockeying for advantage. Will she overcompensate by being even more treacherous than she might have been were she not soon to give birth?

Equity might have fit on today's small screens as well as in theaters, but it's willing take a women's point of view without turning its characters into avatars for obvious feminist point scoring.

And despite the affluent trappings of a high-powered business world, Equity isn't afraid to expose the ugliness beneath the gloss of success.

For Gunn's Naomi, even falling asleep next to her lover, who also works at her firm, poses a business risk. He's liable to take advantage of her slumber by trying to access the data in her cellphone.

What could be more illuminating? In Naomi's world, nothing -- including the bedroom -- is immune from competition.