Kimber Myers
With his narrative debut, writer-director RaMell Ross has made a truly extraordinary film that is equally challenging and rewarding. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel, Nickel Boys is the year’s best movie, formally bold but never austere in its story about a young Black man’s time at a reform school in the Jim Crow-era South. Like his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Nickel Boys somehow simultaneously offers an impressionistic and realistic view of Black people’s experiences, focusing on tiny moments of joy amidst startling injustices and pain.
Largely set in ‘60s-era Florida, Nickel Boys centers on Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a promising Black student, beloved by his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and on the path to success with help from his teacher (Jimmie Fails). While en route to join a program for high schoolers at a Black college, he accepts a ride from a passing car, whose Black owner is soon arrested for car theft. Though innocent, Elwood is sent to Nickel, a Florida reform school, where the white and Black boys are segregated with different facilities, activities, uniforms, and treatment. Even amidst the culture of abuse, Elwood finds friendship and forges a bond with fellow student Turner (Brandon Wilson).
Nickel Boys is shot by Jomo Fray from a first-person perspective, beginning with a stunning scene from the ground up through the branches of an orange tree as sunlight filters through. The moments with these characters (and the talented actors who play them) are certainly moving, but it’s the details of what they see and how they see it that differentiates Nickel Boys. A brochure slowly sliding down a refrigerator, a balloon bobbing near a ceiling fan, icing and crumbs being wiped off a cake knife. It all sounds prosaic, but they’re poetry on screen and these moments make up these characters’ lives.
The POV movies between Elwood and Turner as we see their memories and perceptions of their time at Nickel, shifting back and forth in time. We only glimpse our protagonists in their reflections — whether in mirrors, windows, and the curved, reflective exterior of an iron — or through the eyes of the other lead. We inhabit their world, and this immersive approach drives empathy, but it never feels gimmicky. Ross used this style effectively in the Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and Nickel Boys feels at once like a natural evolution of his work and a huge leap forward. No one else could’ve made this film, and I marvel that a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was adapted in such a nontraditional way. This could’ve been standard Oscar bait, the type of movie we get every year around this time that is competently directed and elegantly made, but nothing terribly special. Instead, Ross has created something transcendent.
The filmmaker intersperses the plot with archival footage, including television coverage of Apollo 8. These clips could merely set the historical context, but they do more than establish the period. It shows that while mankind was making huge technological leaps in space, we were still committing our worst horrors against people here on Earth. We were capable of so much, but we still chose to treat others with such cruelty. And this all happened in living memory; for those who keep insisting that we are living in a post-racial America, it seems like an ever-more idiotic claim with each passing day.
Elwood is a victim of circumstance, both of getting in the wrong car as well as being born in a state in a country at a time when Black people experienced racism and violence for simply trying to live their lives. He pushes back against the system both in his time before Nickel and while imprisoned there, while Turner just wants to survive, both of which are totally fair responses to an unfair world.
Early in the film, Elwood’s teacher plays a recording of the words of Martin Luther King Jr. for his students: “Number one in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth, and your own somebodiness.” Nickel Boys is deeply invested in the humanity of its characters, while America as a whole and the adults at Nickel work to erode their innate value and equality as people in ways both large and small. Nickel Boys isn’t an easy watch, both in its first-person perspective and the profound suffering depicted on screen. Yet Ross has ultimately made a hopeful movie about connection and redemption, even in the face of tragedy, threading light through the dark.
A
“Nickel Boys” opens this weekend in limited release.
