Nickel Boys isn’t just a powerful movie about important and relevant themes. It’s also an audacious burst of brilliance that uses some of cinema’s unique and immersive capabilities to create a lasting experience. This is a movie everyone needs to see. The movie is adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, which itself is based on the true stories of the Dozier School in Florida, known for 111 years of abusing and murdering its students.
However, before any of that becomes part of the story unfolding on the screen, first-time narrative feature director RaMell Ross (Oscar-nominated for his documentary work) has already gripped audiences with lyrical and evocative filmmaking. From the moment the movie begins, the audience embodies the first-person perspective of a young Black boy living in the Jim Crow South. All exposition is handled as we experience the world around him. The cinematography and sound design are main characters from the rip, creating moods and moments that you’ve never had anywhere before.
There is something almost novelistic about the approach, a Hemingway-like adherence to the simple details of fact-based experience with no fluff. But there’s also a Faulknerian lyricism that can only come through the melding of sound and image in a dream-like series of cuts through (a particularly Southern) space and time. Nickel Boys does all this through its expert use of cinema’s many popular parlor tricks people have grown used to over the years. They are employed here in manners that pack a very different punch.
Two Boys with Different Perspectives (Literally)
Elwood Curtis’ college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview.
Release Date January 3, 2025
Director RaMell Ross
Cast Ethan Herisse , Brandon Wilson , Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor , Hamish Linklater , Fred Hechinger , Daveed Diggs , Luke Tennie , Sunny Mabrey , Gralen Bryant Banks , Sara Osi Scott , Rachel Whitman Groves , Escalante Lundy , LeBaron Foster Thornton , Ethan Cole Sharp , Najah Bradley , Mike Harkins , Jimmie Fails
Runtime 140 Minutes
Writers RaMell Ross , Joslyn Barnes , Colson Whitehead
Pros
- Nickel Boys brilliantly incorporates various cinematic techniques to fully immerse audiences and create empathy.
- Powerful performances across the board, which are inexorably linked with the phenomenal POV cinematography.
- A riveting piece of filmmaking shines a light on an important story.
Cons
- The editing and camerawork may confuse some people.
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Nickel Boys uses sound and picture to put audiences somewhere they’ve never been and can never go. The power of this is remarkable, and its potential impact far-reaching due to the implications of the story and the historical nightmare upon which it is based.
Ellwood Curtis’ life happens in jumps of time, and we pick up mostly that he lives a happy life with his grandmother, he studies hard, has promise, and eventually is on a walk to start his higher education. Jumping in a car with a friendly-seeming driver on his walk to school lands him in big trouble when it turns out the car was stolen.
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This brings Ellwood to The Nickel, a juvenile reform center, where he learns quickly that everything is rigged against him. He befriends Turner, a more jaded soul who has figured out his own means to survival. Turner is charismatic and charming, and it’s only when we meet Turner that we shift in POV and finally see Ellwood clearly, through the eyes of another. At this point, the story becomes about how the two of them see each other and the world.
They discuss how to get out of the Nickel and come into conflict over it. Ellwood has faith in his grandmother and a lawyer she hired; Turner has faith in nothing but his ability to navigate constant injustice as “obstacles.” Eventually, these ideas merge, as do their perspectives in a third act that has to be experienced in the theater, like the rest of the movie.
‘Nickel Boys’ Employs the Many Cinematic Innovations of Film History
Nickel Boys evokes some of film history’s biggest moments and movements. From the aspect ratio shift to 4:3, to the use of the “oner,” to the first person/POV camera, to the layered Altman-esque soundtrack, the movie is packed with tools that have been used often to highlight ‘filmmaking.’ But this time it’s all used for a much different purpose and used effectively.
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Some scenes and moments will stay with you, and haunt you because you come close to experiencing them. A simple sequence of a woman cutting two slices of cake is one of the more impactful scenes of the year, for instance. It can’t be described here, it has to be experienced in the context of this plot, of the history of the American South, and in how the artisans behind the camera work in tandem with the actors. This is true of the entire movie.
The first-person experience in cinema isn’t new to Nickel Boys, though they’ve taken it to new heights. It has been done before with multiple notable examples. Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an entry that seems most similar in its use of the storytelling perspective to truly align the audience with a character’s unique experience. Lady in the Lake was meant to approximate the style of Raymond Chandler’s writing, a directorial debut of Robert Montgomery that failed at the box office. Dark Passage used the device as an escaped convict(Humphrey Bogart) changes his appearance, and we only see him from the third person once this process is complete. None of these movies manage to pull of the total immersion into someone’s life.
In addition to the use of the POV camera, Nickel Boys uses a series of “oners”, movies like Birdman come to mind, or the famous opening shots from The Player, Touch of Evil, and the Copacabana shot in Goodfellas. There are things about all those movies and their illustrious filmmakers that could easily be applied to the audacious debut of RaMell Ross. Nickel Boys doesn’t just use these tools for the sake of using them, or for show. They become practically invisible within the context of the story. They are all means to an explosive and chilling end.
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The experience the movie creates allows exposition to unfold for us piece by piece. More than that, the tools impart the meaning of the story and let us live through some tiny shred of experiences few can communicate or share. The phrase “walk a mile in my shoes” keeps coming to mind. But the power of cinema has always been its ability to transport us to other places, and allow us to experience the world from other perspectives. The latter has rarely been done to this effect.
The Camera and the Characters of ‘Nickel Boys’
The performance of Ellwood is created through a constant dialogue between actors Ethan Herisse, Ethan Cole Sharp (young Elwood), Daveed Diggs (adult Elwood), and the audience itself as Elwood’s perspective. It’s a fascinating way to build a story and protagonist, again unlike any we’ve seen before. Turner is played excellently by Brandon Wilson, who becomes a part of this experience as well once we start living in his POV from time to time.
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If there is a flaw to Nickel Boys, it’s when the latter half of the second act starts to sag. The editing sometimes jolts us between perspectives too fast to catch up to what’s happening and who is seeing it, and we spend some sequences waiting and wondering. It’s hard to consider it a major flaw, however, when the story uses the very same tactics for such impressive results elsewhere. That said, the major plot points that happen in rapid succession in certain pivotal stretches are a bit obscured by some of the editing choices. It may simply come with the territory of the film’s unique approach, which is worth everything and more.
‘Nickel Boys’ Matters Right Now
Author Colson Whitehead was coming off the Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, and wasn’t keen on jumping into another book with such heavy themes. The Election of Donald Trump in 2016 changed his mind. This choice and motivation seem relevant as we sit in 2024 with the release of the film adaptation coming on the cusp of another Trump victory.
On the surface, the story has nothing to do with politics. The personal, POV story of Ellwood Curtis and Turner is set against the influential backdrop of the civil unrest and change of the 1960s, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, to the space program, to mentions of Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act. It all has a distant impact on our characters. How they view those things differs, but it supposes there is something better perhaps coming. Not coming soon enough to save them, though. Not coming soon enough to change the lives of most individuals suffering constant injustice.
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The “hope” always feels far away and out of reach. So often, progress only comes after many bodies lay deep in the ground, hidden from history. Justice for those from the real-life Dozier School came half a century later in the form of public apologies, and potential bills for scholarships and monetary compensation to victims and descendants. After you’ve lived through Nickel Boys, it all seems an empty gesture from those who continue to hold power and skirt accountability.
While the politics of today don’t factor into the plot of the novel or the film, the concept of polarizing hate, ‘othering’ our neighbors, and reversing laws related to human rights is deeply unsettling. American amnesia allows for an “it’s fine; it’s all better now” approach to the nation’s history of atrocity and injustice. Filmmaker RaMell Ross, like novelist Colson Whitehead, refuses to go quietly into that good night, using every tool in cinema’s arsenal to remind us who we’ve been and what we’ve done. The modern prison system isn’t a far cry from the world depicted in The Nickel; the gross miscarriage of justice persists.
If a single film has any hope of helping individuals everywhere get a small taste of what it’s like to suffer the fate of human beings stripped of all rights and cast aside in unmarked graves, this is that film, and it is a film for the ages. Nickel Boys will be released on Dec. 13, 2024, from Amazon MGM Studios.
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