James Baldwin’s Paris Ghost

“Jimmy” opens Friday at the IFC Center in New York City.

The Barry Jenkins-produced “Jimmy” imagines James Baldwin’s 1948 arrival in Paris as a 24-year-old aspiring writer. Running barely more than an hour, the black-and-white feature by writer-director Yashaddai Owens combines Baldwin’s writings from the era with an imagined look at his first days in France. The result is an experimental oddity that explores the young Baldwin’s physical and emotional liberation as a gay Black man feeling the rush of possibility.

Budgetary limits required Owens to set the film in contemporary Paris, but this has secondary effects. Only the young Baldwin (Benny O. Arthur) wears era-appropriate garb, and he alone rides in a vintage taxi. In every other detail, “Jimmy” attempts to conjure the author’s essence amid hybrid cars and cellphone-wielding passersby. It is a dreamlike transposition that crystalizes Owens’ visual approach, making it one of luring ghosts into the present.

A fragmented, mostly silent narrative captures the author’s trepidation upon arriving. A stranger in a strange land, he blossoms upon finding queer companionship and artistic community, moments which Owens plays on fast-forward, matching the rush of self-discovery. Although “Jimmy” uses an internal Baldwin voiceover in its closing minutes, the runtime is dedicated to his physical body as much as his soul, focusing on his hands and feet in moments of contemplation, to the point where it becomes an intimate anatomical study.

It is a dreamlike transposition that crystalizes Owens’s visual approach.

Central to the voluntary exile of Baldwin’s Paris years is the question of what it means to be a Black American, and what it means to leave this label behind. Through his grainy 16mm frame, Owens deconstructs Baldwin’s struggle to achieve a state of unconditional existence, liberated from the racialized labels of his American upbringing. The director suggests Baldwin found this freedom through scenes of the writer in love — with a stranger, but also with Paris itself — frolicking on sun-kissed pavements and lying in cigarette haze in his hotel room in Montparnasse.

The film’s general appearance of ethereality is the byproduct of a process called halation, a gentle glow created by excess light hitting analog film stock. Often an accident, Owen wields this as an intentional artifact, creating a dreamlike fog around Baldwin, which his camera cuts through to access intimate close-ups in moments the writer achieves clarity. This sense of controlled chaos is matched by the movie’s upbeat musicality: freewheeling, euphoric camera movements are scored by composer Paco Andreo’s bebop jazz, matching the era’s rhythms and luring the past further into the present.

Despite its brevity, the movie arguably plateaus by its midpoint. What you see is what you get, leaving few moments of transformation, despite this being the focus of Baldwin’s journey. However, by employing the gritty texture of New York indie filmmaking (typical of the ’60s and ’70s) and the asynchronous editing of the French New Wave, Owen deploys the film’s aesthetics to embody Baldwin’s journey as a man who finds himself by splitting his soul between worlds in an act of allegorical double consciousness. “Jimmy” may not be about Baldwin in the traditional biopic sense — viewers are unlikely to learn much that is new about his life — but it is to be lauded for striving for something more ambitious: embodying the person it imagines the young Baldwin in Paris to be.

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