Nickel Boys

You’ve never seen a film quite like RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. The filmmaker, with an inspired Jomo Fray behind the camera, delivers a visual poem of tragedy, resilience and American history.

Ross, along with Joslyn Barnes, adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, but brings such human and humane treatment that the nonfiction roots cannot be ignored. Whitehead wrote about the Dozier School for Boys—the same American institution that fueled Tananarive Due’s horror novel, Reformatory. But Ross does not mine the institution’s 110-year history of dehumanization, abuse and murder for horror. Instead, he shows us how powerful that evil was by allowing us to see it through the eyes of two best friends.

You might find point-of-view filmmaking in bursts in other films—Michael Myers watching his sister through the eye holes of his Halloween costume, for example. But Ross never deviates, never leaves the most intimate and personal perspective of the events unfolding. His camera represents either the view from Elwood’s (Ethan Herisse) own eyes, or his best friend Turner’s (Brandon Wilson).

Elwood’s a good kid, smart, kind, and devoted to his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and we see what he sees in lyrical bursts: a party in his childhood, his grandmother praying for him, successes and trials at school, an opportunity to begin college while he’s still in high school, the approach of white police officers, incarceration, the first small piece of kindness offered by a fellow teenage inmate.

And then, for the first time, we truly see Elwood because the camera becomes that one friend, Turner. This is not Turner’s first run-in with the law. He’s begrudgingly protective of the innocent Elwood.

The perspective shift, the elements of Whitehead’s novel that made it seem too difficult to adapt, becomes Nickel Boys’ greatest strength. You cannot watch this film and distance yourself from the injustices or from the small joys. This remarkable subjective intimacy is what made Ross’s documentaries so magical and moving—you come away with a personal relationship with the film and its subject because you have born witness as the subject.

Wilson, Herisse and Ellis-Taylor guarantee that the style is more than gimmick, bringing their characters so tenderly to life that their story will devastate you. The story of a school that dehumanized and murdered Black young men for over 100 years should do that.