'Moonlight' director and DePaul grad take the road to 'Beale Street'

CHICAGO - James Baldwin wrote his novel "If Beale Street Could Talk," about young black lives in 1970s Harlem united by love and divided by criminal injustice, in the spirit of a line Baldwin wrote in his earlier nonfiction essay collection, "Notes of a Native Son." Each generation, he wrote, "is promised more than it will get," thereby creating "a furious, bewildered rage."

Writer-director Barry Jenkins concurs. "Mr. Baldwin wrote the novel when he was (angry). Very." And yet Jenkins' film version of "Beale Street" is a paradox: a beautiful, poetic vision of a cruel time and place strikingly like the present.

This marks the first English-language film