First Trailer for ‘Nickel Boys’ Reveals a New American Masterpiece [Trailer]

Fresh off its explosive world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last weekend, the first trailer for Amazon MGM’s Nickel Boys, from Academy Award-nominated director RaMell Ross has arrived.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead, the story chronicles the powerful friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.

Elwood Curtis’s college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview. Backdropped by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence appear worlds away from Rev. Martin Luther King’s burnished oratory. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood strives to hold onto his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.

In her review for AwardsWatch, Sophia Ciminello called it “a new American masterpiece,” one that “collects and documents not just to preserve the stories of Elwood and Turner, but to expand the definition of how Black experiences are depicted and authored in cinema.”

RaMell Ross earned a Best Documentary Feature Academy Award nomination for his first film, 2018’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening. A breakthrough in nonfiction filmmaking, Ross, in his first narrative feature film, breaks molds again with Nickel Boys, a story told almost entirely through first-person POV, written by Ross and longtime collaborator Joslyn Barnes.

Featuring star-making turns from newcomers Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson (as Elwood and Turner, respectively) and Academy Award nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (King Richard) with Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger and Daveed Diggs.

The film is produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine and Joslyn Barnes, and executive produced by Brad Pitt, Gabby Shepard, Emily Wolfe, Kenneth Yu and Chadwick Prichard.

After a continued festival run that will next include the New York Film Festival, Amazon MGM will release Nickel Boys theatrically in the U.S. on October 25. Here is the first trailer and poster for the film.