Nickel Boys Is a Cinematic Experience Unlike Any Other
In finding a new way to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross changes the way we perceive the world itself. The director’s previous feature, the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was a lightning-strike cinematic discovery. With its fragmented, intimate lyricism, it immersed us in the details of Black life in a small Alabama town, gradually centering on a few years in the lives of two teens. Hale County was an outgrowth of Ross’s work as a photographer, but as a moving picture it was revelatory: The director’s intense focus on mundane but lovingly captured details allowed us to imagine a whole world beyond the frame in all its wonder and sadness. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.
Until now. The opening-night picture of the New York Film Festival, Nickel Boys takes that formal effort even further, despite being a period piece and a scripted literary adaptation. Telling the stories of two Black teens confined to a brutal Florida reform school, Ross almost entirely adopts a subjective camera, shooting from the point of view of his protagonists. It’s a huge swing, partly because others have tried it — in titles as varied as Lady in the Lake (1947) and Hardcore Henry (2015) — and failed. Usually, a movie shot like this is either a curio or a catastrophe, too practiced and deliberate to ever be spontaneous or convincing. But in Ross’s hands, the conceit never feels like a gimmick, or a flourish. Because he’s fused it with the impressionistic sensibility of Hale County, it is now organic, immersive, essential.
Anyone who’s read Whitehead’s novel can tell you that it’s a sad and infuriating work. It starts off as the story of Elwood Curtis (played as a youngster by Ethan Cole Sharp), a precocious, kind introvert growing up in the Jim Crow–era South in the Frenchtown neighborhood of Tallahassee, Florida. Raised by his doting but world-weary grandmother (a very touching Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), the boy is infinitely curious about all he sees. He winds up at Nickel Academy after he hitches a ride with the wrong man on what would have been his first day taking classes at a nearby college. Even after he arrives at this so-called reform school — modeled after the real-life Dozier School for Boys, a monstrously abusive institution from whose grounds nearly a hundred burials have been discovered in recent years — Elwood retains some semblance of optimism and innocence. He’s determined to excel and “graduate,” returning to the world outside and to his beloved grandmother. Then, he meets the laid-back cynic Turner (Brandon Davis), a Houston native who’s on his second stint at Nickel and has few illusions about anyone’s chances of getting out of this nightmare through official means.
Like the novel, the film begins from young Elwood’s perspective, as we see delicate glimpses of a child discovering the world around him. An orange hangs from a tree. A deck of cards is riffle-shuffled. A bare knee lounges in a tub. Ross finds images and sounds that are warm, textured, and evocative: Voices drift, faces pass, hands dance in ways both familiar and beautiful to us as viewers. Christmas trees and imagined family talismans. Subtly, we imagine Elwood through the filter of our own lives. As a result, his gathering tragedy starts to feel like our own.
When Turner enters the picture, Ross’s camera begins to shift between the two characters’ points of view, and suddenly, we get to see Elwood onscreen, played now by the actor Ethan Herisse. Before, we had only caught brief glances of him as a child, his face reflected in steam irons and shop windows. Now, we witness him as the awkward, hesitant, head-down young man that he is — and it’s like we’ve known him for years. One could almost view it as a cinematic corollary of the “mirror stage” of a child’s psychological development, when an infant recognizes itself in a reflection and begins to conceive of itself as a person: When we, as viewers, finally see Elwood, he becomes agonizingly real to us. It’s one of the most breathtaking things I’ve ever experienced in a film.
This unique form of identification is at the heart of Ross’s picture. In fact, it’s been at the heart of his entire project as a filmmaker. Back in 2018, Hale County served as a gentle rebuke to the totalizing, omniscient approach of so many au courant and supposedly objective longitudinal documentaries, movies shot over years that purported to examine and explain the lives of marginalized people. Running just 76 minutes, Hale County contained more humanity and understanding in its slim margins than plenty of longer, more acclaimed efforts. With Nickel Boys, Ross takes the accumulation of lived-in detail that made the earlier film so bracing and turns it into something more collagelike and formally daring but without sacrificing narrative power.
The switch in perspective between Elwood and Turner inaugurates a formal shift — as if the movie were slipping our perceptual bonds, drifting in unexpected directions. As these young men’s lives become more distressed and precarious, we start to see visions of an older Elwood (played in his later years by Daveed Diggs) doing archival research into what happened at Nickel Academy. And so we experience the movie as Elwood, as Turner, as an older Elwood, as an outside observer, in the present tense and the past, within and without, each perspective informing and subtly undercutting the others. And the closer we get to the truth of these lives, the more we understand that we may never fully know them — the great paradox of human interaction.
Nickel Boys is the kind of story that probably could have been adapted in more conventional fashion. It could have jerked easy tears from us — earned tears, to be sure, prompted by our horror at what we’d be seeing onscreen and everything it implied. But there’s something truer and more unshakable about what Ross has given us. In refusing a conventional, objective (and objectified) approach to suffering, he resists easy attempts at pathos. What he achieves here is more powerful and complex. When we’re finally wrenched out of this film, we sense that something very real has been taken away from us.