Outside, the back house looked like a charming Silver Lake vacation rental: bright purple bougainvillea, picnic table in front. Inside, its rustic-tiled bathroom read misplaced Mediterranean. The refrigerator bore cans of LaCroix and not much else. The place felt tenuously inhabited, fratty, as if a pledge named Connor might emerge from a back room to offer everyone cheap beer. And in the bedroom nearest the kitchen, with its lurid red curtain and indigo wall, Barry Jenkins, one of the most thoughtful filmmakers of his generation, stood peering at a panel of computer monitors. He had driven to this editing suite — north on the 101 freeway from his downtown Los Angeles apartment — so he could see about adding 16 seconds to his newest film.

“I want the music to hit exactly where it hit before, you know?” He waited for a response. “You know what I mean, Joi?”

Joi McMillon laughed, and kept her back to Jenkins as she clicked through the file. She is the first African-American woman to have been nominated for the Academy Award for film editing, for her work on Jenkins’s “Moonlight.” They have known each other since their college days, in the film program at Florida State University. “Yessir,” she said. “It definitely will hit where it was before.”

The room was too warm, and just as I thought this, the ceiling vent belched out even warmer air. Male voices down the hall discussed character motivation in some other project. McMillon made the change to the music and played the pass for Jenkins again. The penultimate scene of his film.

“It’s almost like ... ,” Jenkins began. “Not like jazz, because it’s clichéd to say. But yeah, sometimes one movement needs to de-escalate before the next movement can escalate. This is the place where I feel it. It just sucks, because making this choice at this moment means that when we screen in Toronto we won’t have this adjustment in it.” It was the first Wednesday in September, and the Toronto International Film Festival was only four days away. The film, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” would have its premiere there without these 16 seconds, though it’s hard to say if anyone not named Barry Jenkins would have noticed.

This was my second meeting with Jenkins, and — more than during the first — his demeanor seemed bifurcated, one foot still in the shaping of the work, the other stepping into the role of a presenter, devising talking points that would carry him from Toronto through the film’s limited release on Nov. 30, perhaps into the awards season beyond. “I learned the hard way on ‘Moonlight’ that it’s best to be at the forefront of the conversation,” he told me that morning. “It’s almost like tennis, you know? You want to be leading, and not playing off the back foot.” Still, he was eager to show me outtakes, moments that might have been. He spoke of the film as if it possessed an immune system, one with a long list of irritants it couldn’t abide. “The film rejected it,” he said wistfully of one deleted scene.

A work of cinema, like a novel, is a collage. The finished product is a result of hundreds of moments of cut and paste: this take moved and placed next to another one, this voice recorded to change the feel of a scene shot with no voice-over in mind. A shift to the arrangement or size of one small piece can make the whole collage feel unstable, particularly to the collagist. Each time McMillon played the pass again, the score, composed by Nicholas Britell, swelled up and embraced us before shrinking away on command. The scene — on its own, compellingly composed — slid closer to rapturous with the addition of music. A novelist would kill for such a tool.

“What do you notice about that sequence?” Jenkins asked me. I’d watched it several times at this point, but I wasn’t sure what in particular I was supposed to notice. “O.K.,” he said. “Well, I’ll call it. That’s me imitating Baldwin. The voice-over, that’s the one bit of voice-over not taken from the book.”

Before the start of production on “If Beale Street Could Talk,” Jenkins received an unexpected package from Gloria Karefa-Smart, James Baldwin’s sister and the executor of his estate. It contained a brown leatherbound notebook dated 1978. In it were Baldwin’s ideas about how to approach a film adaptation of the novel, some of which suggest that Jenkins made choices the writer would have endorsed — using the words of the novel’s young narrator as voice-over, excluding a certain church scene. “This is the cast he wanted,” Jenkins pointed out, showing me the book in his apartment. There’s Ruby Dee, a mysteriously initialed “D.B.,” the singer and actress Rosalind Cash. Baldwin’s list of dream directors include the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, the French New Wave director François Truffaut and Lloyd Richards, who staged the original production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” “And then I ended up directing the damn thing,” Jenkins said. Baldwin’s handwriting covers the first two pages of the notebook, but the rest is blank, as if the writer started jotting down ideas before being called away to other work.

Jenkins’s apartment, with its wall-length windows, film-related art and preponderance of books, seems an apt place to house this small part of Baldwin’s literary footprint. In his living room I spotted Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” (“I’ve read it at least six times”), Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and, of course, plenty of books by Baldwin himself. On the cement floor — under a bookshelf, behind a vintage cream couch — I spotted Jenkins’s Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Jenkins saw me looking and said he was working on a better spot for it. But he did have the envelope revealing the best-picture win for “Moonlight” framed and hung on the wall, alongside a congratulatory note from Warren Beatty — one of the presenters who mistakenly announced that “La La Land” had won — telling him the honor was “much deserved.” After the ensuing hubbub subsided, Jenkins went to Mérida, Mexico, for a few days to clear his mind. “My favorite thing to do is to sit in the window, the front window of a cafe looking out at the sidewalk,” he said, “which is the worst thing to do, or at least in the immediate aftermath of what happened.”

In addition to this new film’s being the much-anticipated follow-up to “Moonlight,” it is also the first big-screen English-language film adaptation of a novel by Baldwin, a writer whose works are closely guarded by his estate. Much of the country, owing to our current political reality and Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” has recently become better acquainted with a truth black readers grasped long ago: James Baldwin was right about everything. Jenkins began his adaptation of Baldwin’s fifth novel back in 2013, writing a faithful screen version of the 1974 book, in which a pregnant 19-year-old woman named Tish works, alongside her family, to prove the innocence of her child’s jailed father, a young sculptor. This being Baldwin, of course, there’s more to it: a meditation on the radical implications of declaring yourself an artist while black, on what it means to be poor in New York, on the power and limitations of romantic and filial love.

According to Jenkins, this would be the first of his feature films to directly grapple with political themes, but I begged to differ, bringing up the role that gentrification played in his first feature, the 2008 morning-after romance “Medicine for Melancholy” — it’s set in San Francisco, and the two leads even stumble onto a round-table discussion of rising housing prices. In “Moonlight” the ravages of the war on drugs and the brutality of poverty are not at all apolitical. True, Jenkins said, but with that film, “the whole movie is created to almost force the audience to confront what this character is feeling. And so it’s really easy to sit outside the film and just want to hug the film, to hug the main character. But this is Baldwin. In Baldwin, everyone’s implicated, including himself. So I think there’s not a passive path through this film.” It didn’t appear to bother Jenkins that this might make it harder for some “Moonlight” devotees to stay along for the ride to “Beale Street.” There were still plenty of reasons to want to hug this film too.

Barry Jenkins is 38, under six feet tall and solidly built, with a curated nerdiness: translucent glasses, brightly printed oxford shirts, slip-on sneakers, a canvas tote bag. He is willfully kind, and has a plethora of ways to put others at ease. He might call you “bruh” or “boss” or “my dear” or “boss lady,” though when adamant he’s apt to call anyone, regardless of gender, “man.” When he listens to you speak, he lets you know he’s there via a steady cadence of mm-hmms, about 10 per minute, sometimes more. He has the sort of smile that if glimpsed across the room at a cocktail party might compel you to walk over and stand near him. “I will not annoy, rebuff or humiliate you,” this smile says.

“One of the things he says to me a lot is, you know, ‘flies with honey,’ ” his producer, Adele Romanski, another former film-school classmate, told me. “I think that’s a life philosophy that he extends to the work.” This is a useful stance if you are interested in getting actors to open up, to bare themselves. The stereotype of the American director-auteur may be of the demanding genius who bullies his actors into transcendent performances, but Jenkins prefers a nurturing approach: “I try to find a language that the actor can participate in,” he says. “There has to be a language for every single person on set.” These efforts translate onto the screen. But what exactly is it that’s being translated?

It begins with vulnerability. I’ve spent my life loving black men, and I understand black masculinity to be malleable, its fabled rigidity overblown. After work, in the dark, I’ve heard whispered secrets, the wanderings of restless minds. And yet all of my moviegoing life I’d never seen this quotidian vulnerability so accurately rendered in film — not without a wink, a glance away, some posturing that distances — until I saw Jenkins’s “Moonlight.” An adult son tries to keep emotional distance from his mother, a recovering crack-cocaine addict, and cannot; tears stream down his face instead. A drug dealer confirms his profession to a boy (the same son, but younger), thereby admitting to playing a part in what holds the mother captive; the boy leaves, and the drug dealer (a father figure, not a monster) stares straight ahead, defeated. In “Beale Street,” we watch the main character, Fonny, listen to his friend Daniel describe the psychological horror of prison. Daniel begins the conversation nonchalant, swigging a beer, and ends it with his shoulders stooped forward, the light drained from his eyes. His honesty and helpless frustration is so familiar from my actual life that it is nearly too much to bear — a perfect moment of cinema.

I asked Jenkins about his ability to capture a rarely depicted kind of black male vulnerability as he drove us down Vermont Avenue in his white Toyota Prius. He said nothing for a while, a first in our hours of conversation. A chopped-and-screwed version of Solange’s “A Seat at the Table” drifted from the speakers. “I will say that’s not a goal, but I would hope that’s true,” he said finally. “I think I know what you’re talking about, especially these last two films.”

Jenkins is open, specific and effusive when talking about craft, narrative, culture, sports or politics. Less so when discussing himself. He tends to speak in long bursts, turning an idea around out loud before hitting on the declarative statement he likes. He started talking about his work adapting “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” the autobiographical script by Tarell Alvin McCraney that became his breakthrough feature. The story had uncanny overlaps with Jenkins’s own biography: an addicted mother, an upbringing in the same Miami ghetto, subjects Jenkins would not have been comfortable exploring without McCraney’s words as an intermediary. “I can take Tarell’s experience,” Jenkins said, “which is much more open than mine, and I can sew cinematic storytelling into it.” McCraney, whose gay coming-of-age story informs the plot of “Moonlight,” describes Jenkins, who has a girlfriend, as approaching emotionality with something akin to a queer imagination: “I think he has moments where his imagination is not normative. Just look at his work and see. Where there should be broad strokes there are polka dots.”

From left: Stephan James, Barry Jenkins and KiKi Layne on the set of “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Tatum Mangus/Annapurna Pictures

“Barry loves love,” Romanski says. “If you look at his work, there are three different types of love stories from ‘Medicine’ to ‘Moonlight’ to ‘Beale,’ but they’re all love stories.” Love, yes, but also pain. Nat Sanders, who edited both “Moonlight” and “Beale Street” with McMillon, says there’s “a duality” to Jenkins: “Any time he wants to, he’s so charismatic and exuberant. When I do a pass of a scene that really excites him, you get the best reaction you could ever hope to get. He’ll do airplanes around the room and jump up and down, yell ‘Bruh! Bruh!’ and it’s the best. But also, he’s very private and very quiet.” In “Chlorophyl,” a short film Jenkins directed in 2011, working without a formal script, the main character, played by Ana Laura Treviño, reads a James Baldwin quote, translating into Spanish: “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” In a moment of improvisation, Jenkins had handed her his leather cellphone case, on which he’d paid to have these words embossed.

Although he values romance in film, Jenkins is hesitant to say he places as much importance on romantic love in his own life. “I’ve allowed myself to experience growth in love once in my life, but it was so long ago,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ve become accustomed to being alone, or if because of the way I grew up I became conditioned to being alone. But I guess my identity has been formed around being alone.”

We were back downtown now, in the Arts District, pulling up to a bookstore on the hunt for a novel I’d recommended to him. It turned out that this one, the second of three we’d try, did not sell fiction. Jenkins did a lap anyway, searching for a book of photography by Roy DeCarava, whose iconic images of midcentury Harlem served as a visual reference for “Beale Street” and appear at the beginning and end of the film. On our way back to the car, we passed a boutique where Jenkins stopped to inquire after the owner: Had she had her baby yet? She had. Jenkins conveyed his congratulations. For a man who considers being alone a comfortable mode of existence, he makes reaching out to others look easy.

Jenkins was born on Nov. 19, 1979, and raised in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami. When he was 6 months old, riots in response to the acquittal of police officers involved in the death of a black man named Arthur McDuffie worsened blight in his segregated neighborhood. “I’m the baby, by a mile,” he says. “I have one sister, one brother.” His mother gave birth to his older siblings at 15 and 16 years old. Nine years later, she gave birth to him. “I don’t think any of us were planned, but I was definitely a mistake,” he says. “I have no idea who my father is.”

He grew up in Knight Manor (also known as the Village), a housing project built close to the larger Liberty Square projects. His mother was addicted to crack, a fact that Jenkins is both open about and firm in not expounding upon. When “Moonlight” had its premiere, he told me, “We rented a theater just for her to go see the film, and on the day of, she decided she could not see it. Probably my fault. I should have flown back.” Something previously open about Jenkins’s posture — the set of his shoulders, the steadiness of his gaze — closed off as he told me this. Later, he says, his mother happened upon a bootleg copy of the film at a corner store; she bought it and watched at home. “What I see in that,” Jenkins says, “is she just wanted to watch it by herself in an environment she could control. She actually complimented Naomie’s performance” — Naomie Harris, who plays the main character’s troubled mother. “Say of that what you will.”

Knight Manor was torn down, and a new campus for Miami Northwestern high school built on top of it. Jenkins would attend classes there, preparing for the future atop his own demolished childhood home — though he doesn’t recall giving this symbolism much thought. Of his home life during these years he reveals little, though he alludes to it often. “I grew up in a certain kind of way,” he told me. “It’s a crutch. I started therapy, I stopped. I should start it again. It’s a crutch.” His reluctance to explain further may also reflect his general disinterest in creating a public persona, and in the self-mythologizing that goes with it. “It was what was so difficult about everything that happened with ‘Moonlight,’ ” he says. “I’m not smart enough to say as much as I have to say about the film without revealing things about myself. But that’s the last thing I ever want to do.”

In high school Jenkins played football, got good grades, made it to senior year. He had been admitted to the University of Florida, but after a trip to visit F.S.U. in Tallahassee, “I thought: This is the blackest place in America. I gotta be here.” In Tallahassee, he lived with high school friends and intended to pursue a creative-writing degree — he used to be obsessed with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — until one day he walked by a sign for the film school and had a change of heart. He began pursuing a dual degree. “I remember my first short film,” he says. “I put my roommate in it, and it was a strange film. We shot it on a Bolex” — a spring-wound camera associated with avant-garde film — “so it wasn’t like a narrative. It was more experimental.” His roommates, he says, “just looked at me like they thought I had lost my mind.” In the film department, though, Jenkins began making connections with the collaborators he’d work with over the next two decades: McMillon and Sanders; James Laxton, the cinematographer for all his feature-length films; and Romanski and Mark Ceryak, two of his partners at the production company Pastel.

After watching other students’ work, Jenkins didn’t think he had the technical ability to compete. “Digital filmmaking wasn’t anywhere near what it is now,” he says; working on film, “you couldn’t see what you were doing. There’s no playback on set. You can’t shoot it and then immediately pull it up on the memory card.” The filmmaker needed solid knowledge from the start. Jenkins took a year away from the film program to study the craft on his own, finishing his creative-writing credits in the meantime. He moved in with Laxton. The popular directors to emulate in their program were those who made big-budget, Spielbergian features. Jenkins watched foreign art-house cinema in hopes of finding an alternative aesthetic approach. “I remember we’d have running DVDs playing in the background,” Laxton told me. “And as people would come in and out the house, we’d kind of sit down and talk about it.” Before that year, Jenkins would have named “Die Hard” as his favorite film. After, it was the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s stylized, lovesick “Chungking Express.”

When Jenkins returned to the program he wrote and directed the short film “My Josephine,” a mostly subtitled account of an Arab immigrant couple who own a laundromat and wash American flags for free after the Sept. 11 attacks. Over wine at a bar near his apartment, Jenkins recalled making it: “That’s me as a dude who grew up in the hood!” he said, his face alight once again. “That’s not me now, 20 years removed from the hood. That’s me, you know what I mean? And it’s taking my experience of being somebody from the hood who now is a fish out of water in this academic setting, in this film consortium, taking that feeling and putting it into these things. It was empowering.”

After graduation, the director Darnell Martin gave Jenkins his first film job, as her assistant on the set of the TV movie “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” His work on “My Josephine,” she told me, had “so much poetry in it. Visually it was really stunning.” Here was an avenue through which Jenkins could grapple with feelings he otherwise preferred to leave unexamined. “I think when I found film,” he said, “I found a way — I still hide a bit — but a way to not hide as much. I felt like I could put these things into the work because it’s the movie. It’s not me.”

On a very hot August day, Jenkins sat in a color-grading studio in Greenwich Village with Laxton and the colorist Alex Bickel. The big screen at the other end of the room showed a scene at Showmans Jazz Club in Harlem. The characters Joseph and Frank, played by the veteran actors Colman Domingo and Michael Beach, sat at the far end of the bar. The room was realistically smoke-filled for the early ’70s, but too smoky for the purposes of the film. Jenkins and Laxton took turns guiding Bickel on how to fix the problem. They moved on to a close-up of Beach’s face, its topography made more intense by his look of dejection. Jenkins made a noise of approval. “It was like Take 3 of the zoom,” he said, “and he just locked in.”

Jenkins enjoys moments when his actors make direct eye contact with the camera. He and Laxton are in agreement on the power of this sustained looking, how holding the camera on an actor can bring out a host of emotions in the viewer. “If you’re in a dark theater with 300 people sitting next to you,” Laxton said, “and you have someone looking at you from a big screen, I think it does something to you as an audience member.” Alfred Hitchcock employed these sorts of shots, as did Jonathan Demme (who can forget Hannibal Lecter’s stare?), but unlike those filmmakers, Jenkins and Laxton rarely shoot theirs during moments of great emotional agitation. Instead they catch their characters at ease, quiet. “Barry captures silence in a way that we don’t see much, and we especially don’t see that much in the African-American film experience,” Mahershala Ali, who won a best-supporting-actor Oscar for playing the drug-dealer-cum-father-figure in “Moonlight,” told me. “You usually don’t see black people holding peace and occupying silence, having to fill those voids in that way.”

Jenkins shoots these moments intuitively, waiting until he feels something. “I’m not directing them,” he says. “They are just giving me this thing. And sometimes you can look at an actor and see, Oh, there’s the soul.” And if they’re comfortable enough, he says, they can look directly into the camera without losing that soul. “Instead they’re going to give it to the audience.” KiKi Layne, whose starring role as Tish in “Beale Street” marks her first foray into film from theater, described it as looking into a black hole: “I think at one point I told him that ‘Man, this feels so strange’ and he was like, ‘I know, but I need it, I need it.’ ” The actors don’t know where these shots will wind up in the film, and neither, necessarily, does Jenkins, at the time. Later, though, the emotions viewers read on the actors’ faces — a close-up of Fonny near the end of the film goes from anxious and unsure to settled — feel made for the precise moment when they appear on screen.

These looks don’t quite break the fourth wall, because the actors are not regarding the audience. In “Beale Street,” they’re most often gazing at someone they love. For nonblack audience members, it might be the first time they’ve had a black person direct such a gaze their way; Jenkins offers a glimpse at a world previously hidden to them. For a black viewer, there’s more likely a kind of recognition: I know that face, although I have never seen this actor before. Or, if the actor is one you’re familiar with, it can go the opposite direction, letting you see the person anew. Regina King, who plays Tish’s mother in the film, has played a mother or wife as many times as I have fingers, over decades. But who was this woman on the screen, staring at her reflection in a mirror, summoning her courage, while also staring at me? Typecasting actors isn’t simply about having them play a role they have played before; it’s about locking them into the same aesthetic representation of that role. “He knows that it’s not just his film,” King told me. “He can’t do this without the talent of other people, and he allows those talents to shine.”

During the festival season leading up to the theatrical release of “Moonlight,” Jenkins directed an episode of the first season of the Netflix series “Dear White People,” revolving around an actor named Marque Richardson; his character has a gun pulled on him by campus police officers, and by the episode’s end he breaks down, crying. I have personally known Marque Richardson for 15 years and have watched him act in all sorts of roles. This episode was the first time he ever felt a stranger to me on screen.

Jenkins prefers to remain on a last-name basis with older women he respects — “Ms. Winfrey,” “Ms. Morrison” — but when it comes to the woman whose work in film he admires most, the 72-year-old French director Claire Denis, he calls her “Claire,” with possessiveness. He gushes about her on social media (“I JUST MET CLAIRE DENIS AND MAYBE GOT A LIL TEARY EYED”) and describes himself as a “Claire Denis stan” in his Twitter bio. “Having watched so much of her work, and read so many of her interviews, and ingested the principles of how she approaches art,” he says, “I think it does affect the way I make the things I make. But they’re not like the things she makes.” A framed poster for “Beau Travail,” Denis’s 1999 drama of male camaraderie, desire and rivalry within a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti, hangs in his living room. “She’s unconcerned with the audience, I would say. It doesn’t occur to her, and because of that I think her movies are pure artistic curiosity, artistic impulse, artistic reckoning and reasoning.”

This level of artistic freedom is hard to come by in the world of Hollywood-financed film, he thinks, but the possibility of leading such a life — not feeling obligated to have one foot planted in the role of presenter — captivates him. He could also see himself teaching film to others in 15 years. In the short term, though, he is working on a forthcoming limited-series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” for Amazon, and a screenplay based on the life of the gold-medal-winning boxer Claressa Shields. “I wish I had taken a break after the Oscars and all that stuff, but I just went right into this movie, and right into the writers’ room for ‘The Underground Railroad.’ I didn’t really process all that stuff. And now this movie is finally ending, and I think it’s time for a moment to process.”

It was our last few minutes together, and I wanted to know — having heard him speak of a more unfettered artistic life, and witnessing him bring happiness to others with such ease — what exactly made him happy. “I’m never happy, man — I mean, that’s just the case,” he said. He used to think he didn’t deserve to be. Then: “I think making other people happy makes me happy.” He recalled helping Alex Hibbert, who plays the child version of the main character in “Moonlight,” find his footing as an actor. “When other people do things on my sets that either they didn’t believe they could do, or understand they could do, or that surprises them?” That, he said, was amazing. It was a matter of helping them tap into the ineffable. “What I say to the actors, if they ask, is that it’s not about a certain meaning; it’s definitely about a certain feeling. How can we work together to create this feeling, even if the feeling is not knowable?

“I really want that simple life, you know?” Jenkins said. “I think that’s why I fell in love with this book.” He quoted the moment in Baldwin’s novel when Fonny, the young sculptor jailed for a crime he swears he didn’t commit, says he only needs art and the love of his woman to survive: “ ‘I got two things in my life, man — I got my wood and stone, and I got Tish.’ ” Despite the increasing complexity that comes with a successful Hollywood career, Jenkins desires the same. “I have my wood and stone now,” he said.