Where are the great Black on-screen romances? Hollywood has, of course, been churning out classic love stories that center White characters since the beginning. Charlie Chaplin was tugging at heartstrings before movies had sound. Shortly after, the romance genre burst into bloom with It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, Roman Holiday, and Casablanca. At that time (and still), Black actors were fighting to simply be represented on-screen, and every step toward equality in representation took years to achieve. Still, it’s hard to imagine a greater indignity than forbidding space on the big screen for Black characters to love each other. 

The benchmarks have been hard to miss, if only because there are so few. The so-called “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s often featured characters in love—and lust. 1974’s Claudine, co-starring James Earl Jones, broke ground as a non-genre film about working-class Black adults who court and fall in love. In the ’90s, the boom of Black crime films gave way to romances such as Poetic Justice, Love & Basketball, and Love Jones. These films have a deep cultural footprint, but not a wide one. They’re unlikely to be screened this month alongside more well-known Hollywood romances, when repertory cinemas are working to get hopeful lovers to pony up for a Valentine’s Day date.

Technically, 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk is running as part of AFI Silver’s Black History Month series, but its proximity to Valentine’s Day—it screens on 13—cannot be a coincidence. It’s an affecting and distinctly Black love story. Based on the 1974 novel by James Baldwin and adapted by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), If Beale Street Could Talk traces the courtship of Tish (KiKi Layne) and Alonzo (Stephan James), childhood pals who fall in love as young adults, conceive a child, and then suffer a tragedy when Alonzo is falsely accused of a heinous crime by a White police officer.

The obstacles facing Tish and Alonzo run deeper than most Hollywood romances could endure. Even before the arrest, they face a cavalcade of challenges in their burgeoning life together. Her Christian family disapproves of him. Neither of them are able to mount a stable career. Most frustratingly, they can’t find anyone to rent them an apartment, until they run across a young Jewish man (Dave Franco) who is turning an empty warehouse into apartments for young couples like Tish and Alonzo. “I dig people who love each other,” he says. Alonzo later runs into his ebullient old friend Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry), who is all laughs and jokes until he begins talking about his recent stint in prison. His eyes turn cold, his posture stiffens, and he alludes to things he cannot unsee. The narrative forms a mosaic of injustices, some of which can be overcome by love, others with no solution.

True to Baldwin’s novel, the story hinges on two separate timelines, one tracing the young couple’s ascent and the other following the attempts by Alonzo’s mother, Sharon (an Oscar-winning Regina King), to free him from jail. Told chronologically, If Beale Street Could Talk might play as tragedy, but the bifurcated narrative allows the viewer to hone in on moments—Tish and Alonzo’s first night together, their rapture in the streets after finally finding an apartment, or even the painful but hilarious confrontation between families after her pregnancy is announced—rather than be weighed down by inevitability. Jenkins relies on close-ups of his characters looking directly at the camera, a shot pioneered by the late Jonathan Demme, to place the viewer in the path of their love, pulling focus to hope rather than heartbreak.

Love is radical in If Beale Street Could Talk, but it’s also a fact. That’s a lesson Hollywood has needed to hear about Black stories for a long time, and it may be no coincidence that this film wasn’t celebrated like Moonlight, which coalesced into a love story toward the end but was more easily categorized as a social issue drama, a Black genre the Academy can comfortably wrap its arms around. Likewise, many a movie star has been born of an on-screen romance—as the character falls in love, so do we—but neither Layne nor James got the career boost you might expect from such a powerful, intimate story, although both have continued to work sporadically in film and television. Stardom remains a particularly steep uphill climb for Black and Brown actors.

It makes films like If Beale Street Could Talk a bittersweet miracle. Rising above the constraints and cliches of the industry, it fully integrates its human romance and social comment into a stirring tale of love gained and lost. It grounds you with uncomfortable truths while making your heart soar with possibilities. Enjoy it while you can.

If Beale Street Could Talk screens Tuesday, Feb. 13, at 6:30 p.m. at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com. $13.