Fans of Colson Whitehead’s sweeping, devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys might think they know what to expect from RaMell Ross’s new big-screen adaptation of the bruising novel, which recently premiered at Telluride and is now screening at the London Film Festival—but, in reality, they have no idea. It’s a book that could have been made into a sedate, conventional, and thoroughly respectable drama, the gut-wrenching tale of two Black boys at a brutal reform school in ’60s Florida, but instead, the auteur—who was nominated for a best-documentary Oscar for the thrillingly experimental Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and makes his narrative feature debut here—has created something gorgeously bold and beguiling, bringing a surprising freshness and vitality to an undeniably gruelling story.
Nickel Boys makes you aware of its uniqueness from the outset: It’s filmed from a first-person point of view, which installs us in the head of our young hero, the carefree and intelligent Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp as a boy and, later, Ethan Herisse as a teenager). Black trauma porn this is not; you sense that tragedy is on the horizon, but when we first see through Elwood’s eyes, it’s with a joyous, childlike wonder. He climbs on jungle gyms, observes strangers at parties, and looks up at his grandmother (a warm and wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as she sprinkles tinsel on his head at Christmas. With Ross’s keen, poetic eye for detail, a hallmark of his non-fiction work, and Jomo Fray’s swooning cinematography, the effect is utterly magical.
Then comes Elwood’s socio-political awakening: he’s inspired by a teacher who is passionate about civil rights; he watches Martin Luther King Jr. on TV; and when white passengers stare at him on the bus, he averts his gaze, looking down to the floor, only to find a tiny, buoyant Black girl playing under the seats. In this sequence, as in so many others, the camera performs incredible, head-spinning gymnastics, nimbly balancing the hope and promise of Elwood’s world with its ever-present injustices and heartaches.
Eventually, though, the latter overwhelm the former: On his way to some college classes, Elwood hitches a ride with a man whom he later discovers has stolen the car they’re riding in. They’re pulled over and, in one fell swoop, Elwood’s future is taken away from him. His grandmother muses on the cruelty of it all in one powerful scene, as Elwood observes her slicing a freshly baked cake. Ellis-Taylor is so masterful here, so subtle and painfully affecting, that I’ll be outraged if she doesn’t make the best-supporting-actress Oscar shortlist based on this moment alone. Her screen time is limited, granted, but the film relies on her enveloping, maternal presence, as well as our memory of it once she disappears from the narrative.
And she does so soon after: to her horror, Elwood is quickly dispatched to a segregated reform school, the hellish Nickel Academy. While white students play on the lawns and do odd jobs, the Black boys at Nickel face a life of unthinkable violence and back-breaking labor—they receive a poor education, are mired in infighting, and face barbaric punishments for minor infractions. We learn that some of the boys don’t make it back from these disciplinary procedures, either, and that there are countless bodies secretly buried on the premises.
It’s here that Elwood meets the more jaded and street-smart Turner (Brandon Wilson), a fellow inmate who is amused by his new friend’s continued belief in the system. Elwood insists that he can get out—he’ll play by the rules and be released for good behavior, he thinks, or else his grandmother and their lawyer will find a way to bring him back home—but Turner knows that no happy ending is actually, truly possible.
From here on, we begin switching between Elwood and Turner’s points of view, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell whose head we’re inside as the boys trudge across the grounds or face up to their bullies. In these scenes, the first-person perspective is remarkably effective—when boys lunge at Elwood and Turner, we flinch; when they cower in their beds, fearful of being pulled out and tortured by those assigned to care for them, we feel their fear in our bones.
The sequence in which Elwood is brutally beaten for the first time is both chilling and strikingly sensitive: for a brief moment, the camera pans out slightly to show the back of his head as he receives his lashings, as if he’s having an out-of-body experience—and, instead of showing that violence being inflicted on his body, with each lash, the camera cuts to black-and-white photos of Nickel boys who must have endured the same treatment over the years.
We then realize that these images are being uncovered by an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) who, decades on, is now the owner of a small moving company in New York. Nickel, now closed down, is under investigation, and the numerous atrocities which occurred there are finally coming to light, with horrifying stories proliferating on the internet.
It’s abundantly clear that Elwood’s past weighs heavily on him as he navigates his new reality. Once again, the camera is at a slight remove, showing us the back of his head instead of letting us see through his eyes—as we zip back and forth between the past and present, this subtle difference reminds us which timeline we’re in, but it also adds to the sense that this older Elwood is disconnected from himself, and that the only way he could’ve kept on living was by taking a step back from his former life and burying his anguish.
At a bar, Elwood runs into a former classmate who asks him what became of his friend. It triggers a memory of the escape attempt which marked the end of his and Turner’s time at Nickel. There’s a twist here which, when reading the book, feels unadaptable—but, as with everything else, Ross handles it beautifully.
There’s a jaggedness to Nickel Boys that makes it decidedly imperfect; once Elwood has settled into Nickel, certain scenes are overlong, and the film’s climax doesn’t quite match the knock-out power of the novel’s final pages—but it’s such a fearless, accomplished debut that it’s difficult to chastise it. This is a searing drama with an abundance of style and hallucinatory visual splendor, but one in which every choice feels deliberate and meaningful, too.
One of my favorites is Ross’s tendency to splice some sequences with archival footage to create a kinetic collage of the era—shots of the space race, for instance, which locate us in the late ’60s, but also make us wonder how the US could have been pursuing such a high-minded goal on the global stage while also giving into its baser instincts at home, in continuing to turn a blind eye to institutions like Nickel.
But, crucially, this isn’t a point that’s ever articulated, let alone hammered home. And that’s the essence of Nickel Boys: it resists spoon-feeding its audience. It simply presents us with a table laden with riches, and lets us feast.
Nickel Boys will arrive in theaters on December 13.
