The new film Nickel Boys, opening the New York Film Festival on September 27 after a debut in Telluride, is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pultizer-winning novel, a fictionalized account of a real Florida-panhandle reform school whose staff, for decades, abused and in some cases murdered its charges—particularly the Black boys sent there ostensibly for rehabilitation. It is sorrowful, damning subject matter, of the sort that might merit sprawling cinematic treatment.
But director RaMell Ross, a photographer turned documentarian now making his scripted feature debut, takes an entirely different tack in approaching this hefty material. His film is shot mostly in first-person perspective; as an unlucky teenager, Elwood (Ethan Herisse), finds himself dragged into this swampy hell, we watch what unfolds through his eyes. Peripheral vision is limited. Ross tunnels into the heart of a helpless tragedy in narrow framing; we understand the forces bearing down on Elwood, but we rarely see them in full.
Nickel Boys is the most formally inventive of its fall-movie-season brethren, a bold swing of a literary adaptation that mostly earns its gimmick. Though really, gimmick is a cheap word for what Ross is doing. The nervy technical conceit of Nickel Boys has an instructive purpose; it is not mere “look what I can do” grandstanding. Ross has designed his film as a plunge into the visceral realities of racism in America, with no outside framing offering even a hint of escape.
It’s a tough film, rigorous in its intent. But Ross does allow for grace, comfort, quotidian beauty. The opening stretches of his film show us Elwood’s pre-incarceration life in all its precarious potential: he’s a promising student, doted on by the grandmother who raised him (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), in puppy-dog love with a girlfriend, grasping in happy amazement at a future rushing toward him. It’s the mid-1960s in Florida and Elwood is a young Black man, so he is certainly faced with daunting obstacles. But he has, out of both passion and principled intellect, decided to stand on the front lines of the struggle he shares with so many. This is an engaged, determined kid, a portrait crafted in flickering mosaic.
Even if Elwood were on a less noble track, though, that would in no way justify the harsh punishment he receives when he unwittingly hitches a ride in a stolen car, is picked up by the police, and is remanded to Nickel Academy. Ross is careful to insist that no child, of any background, deserves such routine dehumanization. But yes: we are meant to particularly mourn for the future stolen from Elwood, who followed all the rules and was nonetheless relegated to brutal subjugation. Nickel Boys is a stark reflection of our country’s gruesome record; even after emancipation, Black men routinely found themselves dragged into a kind of slavery different only in name.
Ross has made a busy collage of a film, jumping between evocative image and plot with a swiftness that sometimes leaves the audience on the outside. We are not really left to sit in any one particular experience—either of joy or confinement—long enough for it to fully seep in. Ross’s stuttering poetry is more considered than simply stylish, but is not quite as emotionally enveloping as more traditional narrative might be.
Ross does not hew strictly to his central device. The film breaks away from Elwood’s gaze on occasion to show us that of his fellow prisoner Turner (the remarkable Brandon Wilson), a more rebellious free-spirit than his quiet and cowed friend. Stitched together, Elwood and Turner’s perspectives create an intimate picture of ragged and wary optimism. Deliverance must be possible, and yet it cannot be assumed.
The details of Elwood and Turner’s hardship are sometimes directly confronted. More often than not, though, they are only alluded to. Ross insightfully, shrewdly renders how such a nightmare might be processed, especially by someone so young and naive as Elwood. The danger is close by, but life also must plug along. It is only in hindsight, maybe, that the scope of what happened—to Elwood, to everyone—can truly be grasped. Ross makes room for that recollection, drifting into the future (shooting from behind actor Daveed Diggs’s head) to show what adulthood looks like for men struggling to reclaim the humanity robbed of them as teenagers.
Nickel Boys closes in walloping fashion: a final series of sensory flashes serves as heartbreaking coda. One wonders how much more might be felt had Ross laid things out more linearly, had he taken the time to truly delve into particular moments, to flesh out the dimensions of Elwood and Turner’s daily life.
Still, Ross’s elegant, thorough re-creation of time and place is plenty effective as is. And anyway, is witnessing explicit trauma really any more valuable than what Ross chooses to show us? Nickel Boys is perhaps a rebuke to the idea that violence must be plainly stated in order to be understood. Here, it is palpably present in every negative space. What Ross instead affords these young men is the dignity of a point of view, drawing the viewer into the bracing immediacy of mind and body. Nickel Boys is an arduous—and also humane and lovely—trek in another’s shoes. It’s an immersion into two lives that evokes the histories of countless more.
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