Nickel Boys (2024)
Directed by: RaMell Ross
Premise: Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead. Set in the 1960s, a Black teenager (Ethan Cole Sharp) is sent to a Florida reform school. He bonds with another student (Brandon Wilson) and they struggle to evade the abuse and exploitation of the school staff.
What Works: Nickel Boys is inspired by the true story of the Florida School for Boys, a reform institution for juvenile offenders, which was the site of numerous horrors including sexual assault, physical abuse, neglect, and death. This film imagines a teenager incarcerated at an equivalent intuition (here called Nickel Academy) and who faces similar circumstances. Nickel Boys is unsparing in its depiction of the school which comes across as a plantation. The boys are kept in barracks, given substandard food, and forced into labor. Aside from exposing this sordid history, Nickel Boys is also about manhood and identity and memory; the filmmakers explore those themes by putting the audience in the physical space of their lead characters. Most of the film is shot from a first-person point of view; the camera is the perspective of its two lead characters and Nickel Boys is a fascinating experiment in the capacity (and the limits) of cinema to convey experience. We witness the Jim Crow era from their point of view, making this history immediate and occasionally terrifying. The filmmakers bounce between the point of view of the two lead characters. Elwood is a quiet but intelligent youth who is wrongly charged with a crime and sentenced to the Nickel Academy where he befriends Turner, another teenager with a similar disposition. Actors Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson bring these characters to life; the first-person technique could be an obstruction but the filmmakers find ways of defining these characters through action. Elwood and Turner look out for each other but Elwood is more willing to speak out against abuse whereas Turner opts to keep his head down. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Elwood’s grandmother and Ellis-Taylor gives the film some human warmth. The scene transitions and point of view shifts are done quite well and Nickel Boys goes beyond the immediate experience we usually find in a found footage drama or a pseudo-documentary. It’s more lyrical and the filmmakers stitch together different perspectives, events, and time periods into a collage of recent history.
What Doesn’t: Nickel Boys alternates between the past and present as the adult Elwood researches the Nickel Academy when its legacy of abuse is revealed and becomes a national story. The present tense part of the film is its weakest point. It raises the matter of trauma and the way abuse ripples through people’s lives but it doesn’t do very much with that idea. The adult Elwood remains mostly unknown to us in a way that the teenage Elwood was not; he mostly spends the present tense scenes looking at screens rather than taking any meaningful action.
Bottom Line: Nickel Boys’ novel cinematic style brings this story of the late Jim Crow era to life. The greater significance of that history and its first-person presentation remain a bit elusive but this is an exceptional debut feature from director RaMell Ross.
Episode: #1034 (February 2, 2025)