AFF ‘24: Nickel Boys Review

The first few scenes of RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys shows us brief flickers of protagonist Elwood’s childhood: sunlight filtering through a Florida orange tree, Elwood’s reflection in a TV playing a speech from Martin Luther King, Jr., a classroom filled with young Black boys erasing racist epithets from their hand-me-down history textbooks. Shot entirely in first-person, Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-prize winning book pushes the boundaries of visual storytelling to create a bold and immersive work of art.

Whitehead drew from real-life events to create the eponymous Nickel Academy, a boys’ reform school that Elwood (played by Ethan Cole Sharp as a child and Ethan Herisse as a young adult) ends up in after being in the wrong place at the wrong time—in this case, accepting a ride in a car that turns out to be stolen while on his way to attend college classes. Elwood’s path diverges from his promising future at Nickel, where the color line is drawn even more clearly than his Jim Crow-era hometown: here, the white boys play football in crisp white tees and nice blue jeans, while the Black boys endure hard labor and regular assaults from the staff. 

This is a hard adjustment for Elwood, who the movie quickly establishes as quiet, studious, and fixated on the more just future promised by the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. That his characterization comes through so clearly with a first-person perspective is a testament to Ross’s filmmaking. The camera puts the audience literally in Elwood’s shoes, its movements mirroring his shaking in moments of uncertainty, ducking like his head would when shy or put on the spot. That essentially physical movement of the camera makes scenes where Elwood is afraid almost too real to watch, but Ross avoids falling into the trap of misery porn, instead intimating the violence that takes place at Nickel through the crack of a whip and bloodstains on the walls.

Elwood’s perspective gets turned on its head, literally and figuratively, when he first meets fellow student Turner (Brandon Wilson). We see their interaction twice: first through Elwood’s eyes and then, in a move that puts Herisse on screen for the first time, through Turner’s. With this neat trick, Ross establishes the two boys as mirror images of each other. Elwood, who has that deeply held sense of justice, is convinced his time at the Academy will end as soon as a lawyer acquits him of the crime he didn’t commit. But Turner, who has no family to speak of and who’s spent interminable time at Nickel, keeps his head down and his eyes shut to what happens around him. 

Both Herisse and Wilson are the perfect conduits for Ross’s direction. Though they never share the screen, they make the boys’ growing bond of friendship tangible and bring the script alive. When Turner and Elwood butt heads with their different views of the world—Elwood with the hope of a better future that hasn’t been beaten out of him yet, and Turner’s jaded belief that what happens at Nickel Academy isn’t an anomaly—their debates feel less like moralizing monologues and more like two boys trying to figure out the world around them. It’s a rare movie these days that lets you discover its themes through natural dialogue and realistic characters, rather than force-feeding ideas to its audience.

Ross amplifies these these themes of justice and memory by intercutting the Nickel Academy scenes with archival footage of white violence and snapshots of Elwood throughout his adulthood. The camera hovers over adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs), taking us outside of his perspective for once, and it’s in these scenes that the weight of his childhood trauma bears out: as he clicks through news stories of uncovered gravesites at Nickel or runs into another former student at a bar, that past haunts Elwood like a physical thing.

This stitching together of the past, present and future, real life and story, gives Nickel Boys its weight. Ross’s trancelike imagery and shifting perspectives creates something that feels wholly new, but his audacious play with form and structure is anchored by an emotional throughline that holds true to the original story. The end product is an adaptation that feels unlike anything else done before, a mazelike feat of visual storytelling that leaves you riveted as its last images show on screen.

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