This week Donald Glover, (decreasingly) better-known by his stage-name Childish Gambino, debuted his first actual film at Coachella. A surprising collaboration between Glover, his music video director since ‘3005’ Hiro Murai and Caribbean songstress Rihanna, Guava is billed as a musical thriller, set on the fictional island of Guava in the Caribbean archipelago. While Gambino has already scored legitimate commercial and critical success with his HBO dramedy Atlanta, and even worked with Murai on a selective adaptation of his companion script to 2013’s Because the internet, Guava is a watershed moment in Glover’s career, seeing him transition fully into filmmaking.

The musical sits comfortably in the fresh annals of recent black films- Get Out, Us, Moonlight, Black Panther– paralleling the last of those with a conspicuously similar opening animation about spiritual duality and a magical resource, this time blue silk rather than Marvel’s vibranium. However, whereas Jordan Peele wants to scare you, Barry Jenkins wants you to understand and Ryan Coogler wants to give black girls and boys their superman, Guava Island simply wants to make you smile- a big crescent smile like the cartoon Glover in the opening animation.

The film is built around song, dance and drums. Interestingly, Gambino performs every musical number, Rihanna choosing instead to highlight her acting chops (I suppose we already know she has singing chops for days). Glover’s Deni Maroon (his last name combining the colour of ‘war’- the industrialist Red- and the colour of ‘love’- Guava’s beautiful blue silk) scurries around the island, his eyes wide and wild, late to every appointment, with a guitar in hand and an open Hawaiian shirt billowing in the island wind. While it’s not a hugely original narrative, borrowing bits and pieces from a multitude of classic musicals- Dirty Dancing, Footloose, West Side Story– its style, songs, dances and themes are decidedly Gambino, and decidedly Caribbean, something I assume came primarily from Rihanna, a proud and vocal Barbadian.

Guava is also surprisingly dark, timely and mature. While Rihanna’s singing silence gives the film a sense of duality and weight, with the singer’s Kofi living in the industrialised reality of the island and Deni blindly following the island dream into imminent danger, it also deprives us, the audience, of that ‘Shallow’ moment (pun perhaps intended). A Star is Born this ain’t, and that’s no disrespect to either film. They have opposite themes, ideas and cultural imaginations, and so they tackle them in opposite ways- I think necessarily so. It just might disappoint musical regulars or fans of the two celebrity stars.

DP Christian Sprenger is the last person on the list I need to praise, and exhaustively. Every frame of Guava is expertly lit with only natural light, presented in grainy, saturated 16:9 on what has to be 16mm film, painstakingly constructed in careful relation to the varied environments of the island. Sprenger does everything from City of God to The Stranger to Singin’ in the Rain, giving us favela mazery, beaches, festivals, music, drums, rhythm, melody, thrills, spills, suspense and death, consistently and creatively and embedded in the imagery.

Simply put, Guava is a wonderful film that everybody has an hour in their day to enjoy. And they should.