Micah and Joanne wake up side-by-side one morning in a strange bed in San Francisco with quite a hangover. They don’t remember each other’s names, and Joanne especially, who cheated on her boyfriend the night before, wants to forget the encounter as soon as possible. After a brief breakfast, each goes their own way, but a lost wallet brings them back together not much later. They spend the rest of the day together, talking about issues such as discrimination on the housing market, the local hipster culture and what it means to be black in America.
With Medicine for Melancholy, director/scriptwriter Barry Jenkins shows his hometown of San Francisco in a different light from what we are used to. Even literally: in most of the scenes he removes virtually all colour from the images, symbolic for a city that is getting whiter and whiter because of rising housing prices. Also see Masterclass Barry Jenkins.