Janelle Monáe tends to dream big. So it’s fitting that she would make her acting debut in not one but two of this year’s most celebrated feature films: the feel-good period drama Hidden Figures and the gorgeous, meditative Moonlight. Her move into film makes sense. Not only did she train as an actor before launching her music career, but the three concept albums she has released since 2008 display her deeply cinematic sensibility. Those albums collectively conjure a post-apocalyptic city called Metropolis where, in the year 2719, Monáe’s rebellious android pop star (Cindi Mayweather) commits the ultimate offense by falling in love with a human. While Monáe has gradually relaxed her performance of Cindi—letting her pompadour down and trading her standard tuxedo for other black-and-white threads—her realistic film roles are further releasing her from that glittering alter ego. This move is crucial if she is to keep making music without always playing the android.
So what is surprising is not the fact that Monáe is acting, but the roles that she is playing—two characters that contrast dramatically with her musical persona as well as with each other. If Monáe sings about escaping a metaphorical “Cold War” dystopia by spaceship, her character in Hidden Figures participates in the actual Cold War, helping to propel white men into space. Her role in Moonlight, where she plays surrogate mother to a black gay boy with few escape routes from loneliness and violence, brings both stories down to earth. So while Monáe’s music and films share themes of racial, gender, and sexual “otherness,” they are more profoundly linked by the subtle nuances make her work as a singer and actor so moving.
Hidden Figures tells the true story of three black women—Katherine Johnson (Taraji Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Monáe)—who worked for NASA at the height of the 1960s Space Race. While hidden to history, Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary are all too visible in their own milieu, a male-dominated task force in Virginia where the pots of coffee are as segregated as the bathrooms, and black female mathematicians (often called “girls”) are mistaken for custodians. In keeping with her stylized pop persona, Monáe is the most fashionable, musical, and brash of the three leading ladies. “It’s equal rights: I have the right to see ‘fine’ in every color,” she quips while checking out white men. We first see her applying fuchsia lipstick while leaning against a broken-down Chevy—elegant despite the forces that conspire to keep her and her friends from getting where they need to go.
Yet unlike Spencer and Henson, Monáe’s storyline is defined less by tech know-how and math wizardry than by mundane bureaucracy: the dull, slow process of changing the law that bars black people from taking the classes NASA requires for them to become engineers. (“Every chance we have to get ahead, they move the finish line,” she says.) One of the highlights of the film is the look on her face when the judge accepts her argument. She lets her expression soften; she sees that she’s won. (Later, when her husband gives her a mechanical pencil for her first class, carefully if needlessly showing her how it works, her face radiates a similar warmth.) In the midst of numerous scenes where Taraji Henson does no-fail math equations to dramatic music and Kevin Costner paces around saying things like, “We all get to the peak together or we don’t get there at all,” Monáe’s quiet sincerity and genuine rapport with the other black women stand out.
Hidden Figures depicts an America in which black women—those possessed of massive forbearance, tenacity, and genius—might succeed in a white man’s world, prove their worthiness of equal rights, and ensure America’s global dominance in the process. Moonlight, on the other hand, follows those left behind by that Civil Rights dream. Here are the people of color who, as Gil Scott-Heron notes in “Whitey on the Moon,” have been excluded from the American progress they themselves have helped to finance: “Was all that money I made last year for whitey on the moon? How come I ain’t got no money here? Hmm, whitey’s on the moon.” By the 1990s, the institutions that Monáe’s Mary Jackson earnestly navigates*—*from the courtroom to the university—aren’t even entertained by Moonlight’s protagonist, Chiron (Ashton Sanders). When he’s urged to press charges against his high school abusers, he just puts his head down and cries, before striking out at them himself.
Monáe’s Teresa enters the film when Chiron is just a child (played by Alex Hibbert). She’s wearing jeans, a tank top, false nails, and full curls—a woman who looks good but isn’t trying too hard. This is Monáe at her most grown. After her partner Juan (Mahershala Ali) rescues Chiron from school bullies, Teresa takes him in and feeds him dinner. “You want us to take you home then after you get finished eating your food?” she asks. The phrasing (“get finished”) bespeaks not only her character’s kindness but also Monáe’s pitch-perfect sense of regional speech.
But Moonlight leaves a lot unsaid, and the first thing Monáe does is to be quiet. She gets into Juan’s car and just looks at Chiron, tilting her head in a way that doesn’t presume understanding but shows care. Both Juan and Chiron look to her to facilitate the kind of male intimacy that the film shows to be both dangerous and necessary. Back at the kitchen table, Chiron asks Juan, “Am I a faggot?” “No,” he says, “You could be gay but, don’t let nobody call you no faggot… I mean unless—” Juan glances at Teresa, who shakes her head and gives a little frown that tells him to leave it at that.
Entire worlds are made and unmade in these moments of quiet. Moonlight explores the possibilities of black male intimacy, but it is more broadly about how people help each other to make their own universes in what little space they have. Juan and Chiron are only a few paces out into the ocean when Juan tells him, “You’re in the middle of the world.” The place you claim could be as wide as the globe (as Juan says, “There are black people everywhere”), or as specific your own home (as Teresa says, “It’s all love and pride in this house”).
“This is a cold war,” Monáe sings in the voice of her exiled android, “you better know what you’re fighting for.” If her Metropolis narrative critiques the America whose good intentions and social progress Hidden Figures takes for granted, Moonlight reminds us that the “fight” is waged not only through spectacles of black protest and excellence but also through intimate forms of black love: gaze, touch, laughter, gesture. Monáe’s android alter ego sometimes masks these secret signs, but they have always sounded through the meticulous dream-worlds of her music. We hear them in the watery chimes of “Say You’ll Go” and the lullaby that closes “Many Moons”: “When the world just treats you wrong/Just come with me and I'll take you home/No need to pack a bag.” These moments are important, because the world we are fighting for is not one in which we all have equal opportunity to triumph over the Russians, but one in which people of color are safe being vulnerable—both to pain and to joy—together.
