Some films shine brighter than others. RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys,” a stirring cinematic adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is polished to a remarkable luster. Its assuredness comes on like a stiff breeze on a sticky Southern summer day, telling a boldly conceived story of two Black kids named Elwood and Turner, living during the height of segregation in Florida. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a smart, idealistic kid who is wrongly shuttled off to the abusive confines of a reformatory school named Nickel Academy. Turner (Brandon Wilson) is the bright friend he makes in the dark passages of those days. “Nickel Boys” pulls viewers into the perspective of these Black teenagers with impressive style and unflinching confidence.
This isn’t a film that holds your hand. Shot mostly by switching point of views between Turner and Elwood, Ross and his stellar DP Jomo Fray teach the viewer how to see and feel the world through Black eyes. If the lesson doesn’t take, the blame does not lie with the film. It’s the same daring, honest strategy Ross deployed on his documentary feature “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” a film that similarly expected the viewer to relate to a Southern Black town by observing its everyday movements. The retooling of that desire here, in a fictional realm, the director’s first foray in that storytelling mode, is rife with risk. With “Nickel Boys,” a clear masterpiece held together by visual splendor and idiosyncratic performances, the challenge is worth the reward.
Our immersion into the film’s world begins early on with a kinetic montage of warm images—a sparkling Christmas tree, kids climbing on monkey bars, the faint hint of parents who will soon abandon the protagonist—that reveals the early life of Elwood Curtis (played in these younger scenes by Ethan Cole Sharp). He lives with his doting grandmother Hattie (a moving Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in Tallahassee, Florida, where she works in a motel as a maid. While Elwood knows times are dangerous, the glow of the Civil Rights movement, spurred by Martin Luther King Jr’s words, have given him the optimism that the worst is behind Black folks. It’s a notion that neither his grandmother nor his teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmy Fails), a former Freedom Rider, dispels. It’s the latter, impressed by Elwood’s desire to contribute to the movement through funds and protests, who tells him of a local college allowing high schoolers to enroll. One day en route to that school, Elwood hitches a ride with a stranger who unbeknownst to him has stolen a car. When the police catch the two together, they treat Elwood as an accomplice and send him to Nickel.
The fervent hope instilled by his grandmother does not serve Elwood well at Nickel, where the pastoral landscape belies the terror lurking behind its sturdy walls. If not for the emergence of Turner, you get the sense that Elwood would have quickly perished in such unforgiving surroundings. It’s through his inviting gaze that we see Elwood. Sometimes the camera switches between them, other times it ever so briefly breaks away from them. Both young actors, Herisse and Wilson, hold the emotional tenor of the film together. Despite barely physically appearing in scenes together, you can feel each of their presence in the other’s eyes, expression, and posture. In a film unwilling to cue the viewer’s empathy—it expects you to care for these boys not because the filmic language tells you to do, but because they are human—these actors hold the viewer’s attention.
Similarly, the nonlinear structure, which takes the film decades into the future to an older Elwood (Daveed Diggs)—who is viewed from behind—breaks us from the debilitating pressure exerted by a kind of racism that has only slightly abated by the present day. Likewise, the use of archival footage, such as black and white stills of incarcerated Black kids, Black children celebrating holidays, and visions of Apollo 8, alter our interactions with the white-owned historical record with which the film is contending.
The writerly work by Ross and screenwriter Joslyn Barnes, along with Fray, is nothing short of incredible. They take what feels like a nearly unfilmable book and reformulate the relaxed poeticism of Whitehead into a film whose cinematic prowess overwhelms the viewer with images that would merely be gorgeous if they weren’t so haunting. There are many scenes that balance beauty with melancholy: a meeting between an adult Elwood and a former inmate from Nickel at a bar; soothing hugs from Hattie; rows of lush orange groves where even small Black children are put to work. Within each frame of “Nickel Boys” is not only the recreation of a moment—its stiff air, stifling aroma, and hardened touch—but the texture of the disposed. That integration of the abusive outside world within the internal perspective is what gives this use of POV a life that isn’t a gimmick, but makes a fully-realized experience that builds upon and deconstructs decades worth of film grammar.
The politics of the film go under similar upheaval. Elwood believes that any obstacle can be overcome with resoluteness, the kind practiced by non-violent protest. Turner, on the other hand, is a realist. He believes plain old survival is the key. Their relationship mirrors that of Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in “The Defiant Ones,” a film “Nickel Boys” makes reference to several times. “The Defiant Ones,” is of course a figment of white Hollywood’s imagination. It says that racism might well be solved through mutual respect, and some self-sacrifice on the Black man’s part. “Nickel Boys,” on the other hand, is under no such illusions. Liberation is a hard road. And “Nickel Boys” knows that any conception of freedom comes with a price.
This review was filed from the New York Film Festival. The film opens on October 25th.
