Barry Jenkins, it’s fair to say, got off to a pretty great start to his directing career. His first three films were 2008’s Medicine For Melancholy, 2016 Best Picture Oscar winner Moonlight, and 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk, the James Baldwin adaptation which I believe is even better than Moonlight.
After that, Jenkins wrote and directed a ten-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad for Amazon, which was also outstanding but was one of those things that sort of got lost in the pandemic-era shuffle. He’s also been credited as a writer or producer on a bunch of movies and TV shows in the last few years. Jenkins is associated with telling great human stories, ones that look fantastic, thanks to a look developed by the director along with cinematographer James Laxton.
Last year, Jenkins directed Mufasa: The Lion King, the prequel to the live-action Lion King movie, and much more of a big-budget special effects extravaganza than what the director had typically worked on before. I’m not going to defend that movie in any way on its own merits, except to say that in light of Brady Corbet’s comments about making zero money from his last couple of super-acclaimed films, it’s a bit harder to begrudge a respected career-long indie filmmaker for grabbing a studio paycheck from time to time.
Now comes word that Jenkins has signed on to direct Be My Baby, a biopic of Ronnie Spector that will mark the director’s return to A24, which released Moonlight. The film will star Zendaya as Spector, and will be based on the late singer’s memoir, and presumably, they’ve secured the rights to all the music. There’s no word on who’s playing Phil Spector.
Variety had reported just a couple of weeks ago that Jenkins was “in talks” to direct a sci-fi thriller starring Glen Powell, to be called The Natural Order; it’s not clear which of the two movies Jenkins will make first.
Whatever his next project is, Barry Jenkins clearly has a lot of great movies ahead of him. I’m just glad neither of those films has talking lions in it.
