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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NICKEL BOYS IS A CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE UNLIKE ANY OTHER  
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Bilge Ebiri
December 12, 2024
Vulture
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_ 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. _

Nickel Boys adaptation 'breaks the rules of cinema', Amazon MGM
Studios

 

_This review was originally published on September 27, 2024, out of
the New York Film Festival. We are recirculating it timed to _Nickel
Boys_’s theatrical release._

In finding a new way to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning novel _Nickel Boys_, director RaMell Ross
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the way we perceive the world itself. The director’s previous
feature, the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary _Hale County This
Morning, This Evening_
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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
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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
Wilson), 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.

_BILGE EBIRI is a film critic for New York and Vulture. His work has
appeared in The Village Voice, the New York Times, Rolling Stone,
and the Criterion Collection._

 

* Film
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* Film Review
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* Nickel Boys
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* Colson Whithead
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* Ramell Ross
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