Nickel Boys

Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross, who just last week won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, would likely agree. He’s made a deeply moving film by focusing almost entirely on the subjective experience of his two protagonists, revealing their rich inner worlds by having the audience quite literally see through their eyes. That isn’t hyperbole: Nickel Boys was shot POV style by cinematographer Jomo Fray, whose first-person lensing allows you to step into the characters’ shoes.

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It isn’t an easy march. The plot, diffuse though it may be, concerns a Black teenager named Elwood (Ethan Herisse) who gets sent to a cruel reform school in the Jim Crow ‘60s after being arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s there in Florida, at Nickel Academy, that he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), soon to be his closest friend. Their bond is forged by shared hardship and is all the more resilient for it, a “you had to be there” intimacy that others can hear about but never wholly appreciate. An adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys, the film begins its theatrical run today.

Anyone who saw Ross’ Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening and expected him to abandon his ethereal aesthetic in his narrative filmmaking is sorely mistaken. Nickel Boys is every bit as wispy and impressionistic as its predecessor. You feel, at times, like you’re watching someone else’s life flash before your eyes: first-person visions of formative childhood moments, grainy news footage, and half-formed recollections so personal you might feel like a voyeur rather than a viewer. Some of the most arresting imagery is also the hardest to make sense of in the moment, which is fitting for a movie so committed to capturing the essence of memory.

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Given the subjective, at times unreliable nature of how we recall such events, you might even wonder at times whether what you’re seeing is “real” in the strictest sense of the word — as when an alligator appears in the middle of the street one night while streetlights flicker ominously over its slithering form. This uncertainty doesn’t fundamentally alter the in-the-moment experience, which is fragmentary by design. It’s also wholly absorbing, albeit in a way that requires you to be on Ross’ wavelength, and a deliberate technique rather than a hollow act of showmanship. By the time the credits roll and you understand what everything was leading up to, scenes you didn’t fully grasp as they were unfolding have a new, revelatory weight to them.

You feel, at times, like you’re watching someone else’s life flash before your eyes.

Sometimes we’ll see the same event from multiple perspectives, always point-of-view style, the initial meeting between Elwood and Turner being the most notable example. It’s the first time we see Elwood’s face, as well as an indication that Turner is as important to this story as Elwood. Ross, a documentarian at heart, also throws in footage of everything from Martin Luther King Jr. speeches, the Apollo missions, and the film The Defiant Ones. Here, too, he’s being purposeful. Stanley Kramer’s 1958 drama follows two prisoners played by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier who are shackled together as they make their escape from the big house — a struggle that has echoes in Elwood and Turner’s burgeoning friendship.

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Nickel Academy is more than a little like a prison, especially when its cruel administrators mete out corporal punishment for small infractions. Whitehead based it on the Dozier School, whose infamous 111-year tenure ended with the discovery of dozens of unmarked graves. The specifics, though distressing, are also part of a larger problem: “This is just one place,” Turner tells Elwood. “There’s Nickels all over the country.”