Nickel Boys

The violence committed against boys – especially Black boys – in so-called reform schools across the Jim Crow South were acts of absolute horror. So, in some ways, it makes sense that director RaMell Ross has taken a cinematic convention most commonly associated with horror films as the visual dynamic for his debut narrative feature, Nickel Boys.

Call them first-person perspective or POV films, the idea of looking through the protagonist’s eyes has become synonymous with found footage, and so has become primarily the remit of horror films. There have been a few diversions into thrillers like the screenlife Searching franchise and action in Hardcore Henry. Yet, aside from the “locked-in” sequences of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it’s seemed an angle at which no director wanted to view a drama.

It’s arguably therefore fitting that the filmmaker best known for his 2018 experimental documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, chose to film his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys in this way. Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winner deftly interweaves two narratives – that of young Elwood Curtis (Herisse), a college-bound young Black man in Florida who was just in the wrong car on the wrong day in 1962, and his older self, now settled in New York but still burdened by trauma. However, Ross and producer/co-writer Joslyn Barnes take a cold approach by viewing events literally through the eyes of Elwood and Turner (Wilson), the closest thing Elwood has to a friend at the Nickel Academy. Modeled after the all-too-real Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida, Nickel’s cicada-filled orange groves seem removed by more than distance from the bloodstained stones of Alan Clarke’s seminal British borstal drama Scum. But the same horrors – the abuse, the bullying by adults and fellow residents, the racism, the view that these boys can just disappear and no one cares – are buried just beneath the surface.

Whitehead’s work could readily have undergone a much more conventional adaptation, as happened for TV with his prior and equally lauded novel, The Underground Railroad. By immersing the audience fully in the lived experiences of timid, civil rights-minded Elwood and the more morally ambiguous Turner, Ross removes the distance between the audience and these exploited young men who forever exist under the psychological burden of being “Nickel Boys.” That intimacy means he can pull back on showing the worst atrocities but – as with Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest – there’s no doubt it’s always in the corner of our shared eye, a constant source of dread and threat.

Yet sometimes that same effect is alienating. Sometimes, we are less in their shoes than those of cinematographer Jomo Fray, whose work here is undeniably astonishing but often feels like a camera in motion rather than the view of the protagonist – a little too smooth, a little too clean. Strangely, one of the most effective sequences comes when he breaks out from first- to third-person, as the now-grown Elwood (played by the back of Blindspotting and Hamilton star Diggs’ head) runs into fellow Nickel Boy Chickie Pete (Tate). Maybe it’s because it’s a respite from the conceit, or maybe it’s because it’s a reminder that you can never truly get inside someone else’s head – a concept that becomes increasingly important as the interplay between the past and its future becomes less clear.

If anything, Ross’ work reminds us that the camera need not be God’s unblinking eye on a story. He has crafted an exceptional film driven by captivating performances. Through his unexpected yet welcome camera positioning – for the most part – he gives a clearer glimpse of its emotional core.