Summary
Chiron drives on the highway. Superimposed on the image of his car is one of kids playing on the beach in the growing moonlight.
Chiron pulls into a parking spot at the same diner where we saw Kevin earlier, his car pumping with music. He enters the diner and sits at the counter. Inside the diner, a romantic song is playing. We see Kevin bringing customers food, and he yells to Chiron that he'll be right with him, clearly not recognizing him. Chiron, however, seems to understand that it's Kevin.
As Kevin approaches, the two share a moment of intense eye contact, and Kevin recognizes him. Chiron is characteristically speechless, and Kevin jokes, "You ain't changed one damn bit. You still can't say more than three words at a time." Kevin tells Chiron he's going to make him the "chef's special" and disappears into the kitchen.
Kevin prepares the chef's special, a Cuban dish he's clearly learned to make, with care. When he returns, he finds Chiron looking at the jukebox. He sets the meal down in front of Chiron and asks if he'd like some wine. Chiron says he doesn't drink, but Kevin goes to get him some anyway. Chiron takes advantage of Kevin's absence to take out the gold fronts he wears on his teeth now. Kevin toasts their reunion, and Chiron downs his entire glass of wine.
After getting up periodically to serve customers, Kevin shares what's happened to him over the last decade. He had a child with the girl he used to date, Samantha, but he says they're not together anymore. Kevin shows Chiron a picture of the kid, a little boy named Kevin Jr., in his wallet. He also admits he went to prison briefly. Feeling himself talking a lot, he asks Chiron about himself, but Chiron is quiet. "These are grandma rules," Kevin jokes. "Your ass eat, your ass speak."
Finally, Chiron admits that he's "trapping," or selling drugs. He explains that he met a man in juvenile prison after beating up Terrel. That man "put [Chiron] on the block" selling drugs, and he advanced through the ranks. Kevin is shocked and tells Chiron, "That ain't you." Chiron replies that Kevin doesn't know him, to which Kevin responds defiantly, "I don't know you?" Their conversation is broken off when a customer needs to pay, and Kevin gets up. As he clears plates, he asks Chiron why he wears fronts.
Chiron reflects, hearing the sound of waves pounding against the beach, reminding him of his childhood tryst with Kevin. When Kevin sits back down, Chiron asks him why he called, and Kevin tells him again about the man who came in and played a song on the jukebox. He gets up and plays the song, which turns out to be "Hello, Stranger," by Barbara Lewis, a boppy 50s love song. The lyrics are, "It seems so good to see you back again," and the two men listen to it and stare at each other emotionally.
Kevin closes up the diner and follows to Chiron's car. This time, it is Chiron who gives Kevin a ride home. Kevin laughs at the car's garishness, especially with the loud, pumping music.
In the car, Kevin admits that he normally takes the bus, saying that it's getting tough to survive in Miami. He thanks Chiron for the ride, echoing their ride home after their beach romance, and asks Chiron why he drove all the way to Miami. Chiron is quiet, and Kevin seems smug. He asks Chiron where he's going to stay that night, and Chiron just turns up his music to drown out their conversation. Kevin laughs.
They arrive at Kevin's apartment, and Chiron notices that it's next to a beach. He looks at the waves and then follows Kevin inside. Kevin changes into a blue shirt and starts asking Chiron who he really is. He asks if Chiron has really transformed into a hardened gangster, and says it's not what he'd expected. Chiron says he started over in prison and "built [himself] hard" in order to survive. Kevin admits he he wasn't behaving like himself as a kid, but now takes pride in having a life, referring to his child and job.
Chiron seems to get emotional over their discussion and admits to Kevin that he's the only man that has ever touched him, and that in fact he hasn't really been touched by anyone since Kevin. Kevin takes this in and eventually smiles at Chiron, who holds his chin higher, trying not to cry. The men hold each other.
We cut to a shot of Little on the beach in the moonlight. He turns to look at something we cannot see.
Analysis
In this final section, Jenkins breaks with the rest of the film in that he allows the characters to remain in a single location for several scenes. Until now, we've largely experienced Chiron's journey in impressionistic terms, mostly through flashes of moments, rather than a series of scenes that breathe and play out. Here, Jenkins instead offers us unity of time, place, and action, allowing us to watch Chiron and Kevin's awkward reunion in real time, without the relief of the dreamy sequences to which we grow accustomed from the film's start.
A notable exception to this is, of course, the aural imagery of the waves that Chiron hears after he and Kevin get into a spat. Because it is so clearly emanating from Chiron's own imagination, this functions as an impressionistic break in this literal, real-time world where Kevin and Chiron have their reunion. Indeed, it reminds Chiron, as well as the viewer, of the sensual in a series of scenes that are largely bottled and literal.
Jenkins also formally experiments with diegetic music in this section, breaking with the mostly non-diegetic approach to music that he has used throughout the film. Suddenly, we are allowed to experience songs like the chopped and screwed stylings of Jidenna's "Classic Man," which Chiron actively uses to block Kevin's questions by turning the volume up. Perhaps the salient song of the whole film, however, is Barbara Lewis' "Hello, Stranger," which clearly speaks the words that Kevin and Chiron can't say themselves.
Because the nature of a reunion is such that what has changed (and what hasn't) is front and center, these scenes also make explicit the changes in Chiron that we infer from the start of the chapter "Black." In doing so, it also wraps up a number of the film's unresolved questions and themes, such as identity and fate. Whereas Chiron approaches his reunion with Kevin armed with the physical and emotional "hardness" that he describes later, the conversation frequently derails into Kevin poking holes in that hard outer shell by asking, in various ways, "Who is you, Chiron?" One of the clearest examples of this comes when Kevin tells Chiron that dealing drugs just isn't him, to which Chiron retorts that Kevin doesn't know him. Kevin challenges Chiron right back, saying, "I don't know you?" and staring him in the eye. Indeed, the men's reunion is rife with conflicts like this, each one tugging at the loose threads of Chiron's identity, which he clearly thinks he has forged for himself according to Juan's guidance. Kevin, on the other hand, clearly misses the softness and vulnerability that Chiron had as a boy.
This section also builds on the parallelisms and the role reversals between Chiron's childhood and his current lifestyle. An important example of this is his offer to give Kevin a ride home, which mirrors the night Kevin gave him a ride home after their tryst on the beach. Such a reversal clearly amplifies the changes in Chiron's identity between childhood and adulthood. Even so, certain things remain the same—Chiron's quiet demeanor, for example. Kevin notes this, saying "You ain't changed one damn bit. You still can't say more than three words at a time." Here, Kevin echoes the scenes in which Juan and Teresa use home cooking as enticement for Chiron to talk. Thus, even as Chiron has clearly adopted elements of Juan's lifestyle, Kevin likewise grows into a double of Juan, providing Chiron with the comfort that shocks him out of his tough-guy act.
Ultimately, by the end of the film, we are unclear as to whether Chiron will ever truly find himself or the love that he craves. What does become clear is that, despite his attempts to "decide for [himself] who [he's] going to be" à la Juan, Chiron has never truly let go of Little. By jumping so suddenly from the shot of Kevin holding Black, and the one of Little in the moonlight, Jenkins seems to conclude that, despite the obvious differences between Little and Black, inside even the toughest or "hardest" man is a little boy, vulnerable and fragile in the moonlight. Time seems to operate fluidly in the film, allowing Chiron the little boy to be just as present for the viewer as Chiron the grown man. This circularity of identity and age is central to the film, since Chiron's journey as a whole blurs the line between Chiron's individual agency and the influence of his environment, or "nature versus nurture." Indeed, so many of the film's themes—especially redemption, cyclical identity, and masculinity—are encapsulated in this single cut between Chiron as a man and Chiron as a boy, both fragile and nameless despite a lifetime of attempts to change his identity. In this final scene, performed masculinity breaks down and even recedes to reveal the child within the man. Here, neither Chiron nor the viewer can answer the question "Who is you?" Chiron swims between identities, making it impossible to pin him down.
