‘Nickel Boys’ Review: RaMell Ross’ Audacious Colson Whitehead Adaptation is a New American Masterpiece | Telluride

Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Nickel Boys,” begins with an arresting line: “Even in death, the boys were trouble.” When archaeology students unearthed dozens of unmarked graves at Nickel Academy, a reform school in rural Florida, the cruelty and gravity of the abuse the boys experienced at the hands of the staff surfaced. It’s an introduction that begins at the end, illustrating the deaths of the boys and the terrors of Nickel as an inextricable link between the past and the present. In his first narrative feature, RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning, This Evening) opens Nickel Boys not with an elegiac discovery but with an impressionistic revelation; a vision of life in all of its smallest, most natural forms. Death is around the corner, but it’s not here just yet. 

Oranges glisten overhead in a tree, a tiny hand twirls a leaf, colorful Christmas lights glow. A woman’s voice calls lovingly to Elwood, and minutes later, his parents talk about leaving him. These are the first details of Nickel Boys that Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt) showcase in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and a stunning first-person point of view that audaciously continues for the duration of the film. These details are Proustian touches of life existing in bright, vivid detail for a young Elwood, only to resurface in startling forms as he grows, recalling a time now lost while simultaneously hurtling him into the reality of the present. As Elwood (Ethan Herisse, When They See Us) grows, he observes the evolving Civil Rights Movement on the display TVs at the store (in another spectacular shot from Jomo Fray), listens to Martin Luther King at Zion Hill on vinyl, and becomes inspired by his teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) to join the cause. For Elwood, the marches indicate an ever-changing, evolving world, similar to the Apollo 8 mission footage Ross incorporates into the fabric of Elwood’s story. Mr. Hill recognizes just how bright Elwood is and encourages him to take free classes at the local technical college. With one of the film’s most stunning images, Fray focuses on the college pamphlet slowly slipping down the fridge, the magnet not strong enough to hold Elwood’s lottery ticket. It’s one of the many visual metaphors that Ross and Fray incorporate into the film to depict the reality of Elwood’s world as a young Black boy in the South. In a cataclysmic twist of fate, Elwood is in the wrong place at the wrong time (hitchhiking on his way to his first college class) and is sentenced to Nickel Academy. He tells his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) that he’ll be back soon. 

The boys at Nickel never come back soon though. They’re exposed to the Draconian ways of the white men who run the institution, dangling a carrot in front of them that they can never reach. Like the other boys, Elwood starts out as a “Grub” and can’t graduate Nickel until he either turns eighteen or reaches the “Ace” rank. At Nickel, the teachers subject college-bound Elwood to rudimentary mathematics and force him to learn life’s meanest lessons instead. Just as Hattie told him, being nice to others gets everyone in their family in trouble. He soon develops a friendship, though, and meets Jack Turner (The Way Back’s Brandon Wilson), a fellow Nickel boy whose outlook on the world couldn’t be more different from Elwood’s. While Elwood is still optimistic about getting out of Nickel and the possibility of broad systemic change, Turner has resigned to the fact that a country built on war and genocide can never really change for the better. Still, these alternate perspectives only complement each other as Ross shifts the first-person point of view away from Elwood for the first time in the film, smartly repeating the boys’ first meeting in the cafeteria, but now from Turner’s perspective. The transition is seamless and beautiful, yet full of pain. After witnessing Elwood grow up and experience so much violence and unfairness, there is something striking in seeing his face in close-up for the first time, knowing what others see when they interact with him. Herisse and Wilson give brilliant performances, capturing Elwood’s careful, thoughtful disposition and Turner’s seen-it-all attitude and protective nature. More importantly, though, each actor’s interpretation of their character works as a refracted mirror for the other boy. Fray further emphasizes this with a stunning shot of both boys looking up at an overhead mirror, making it unclear for a moment just whose perspective we’re in. In this way, Ross illustrates an observation of the other and a reflection of the self, as if through their budding friendship their experiences and attitudes converge. As the point of view shifts more frequently between Elwood and Turner, Ross displays the experience at Nickel and of Black boys as tactile and collective. 

Ross’s decision to tell this story in alternating perspectives and first-person point of view is unlike anything found in contemporary American cinema. It is also a bold choice for a film based on a widely celebrated novel, breaking open what it means to adapt and document. Ross and Joslyn Barnes’ screenplay recreates many of the novel’s signature dramatic moments (Griff’s boxing match, Elwood and Turner’s “community service” trips to Eleanor, Hattie’s heartbreaking visit to Nickel) yet brilliantly recontextualizes them within an entirely new milieu. In Ross and Barnes’ script, Griff’s fight is less about the boxing match and more about the white men betting and colluding; Elwood and Turner’s trips to Eleanor aren’t just a respite from the horrors of Nickel, but an exploration of the queer-coded gazes and alchemy shared between two young boys; Hattie’s visit to Nickel is especially heartbreaking. Here, Ellis-Taylor’s performance shines as she holds a Jonathan Demme-like close-up and expresses her desire to see her grandson. She speaks with Turner, hugging him not once but twice because she can’t see her Elwood. The camera presses up into the fabric of her dress, first with the light touch of a comforting stranger, then with the force of someone who needs the physical touch of a familiar member. 

The perspective changes once more to the present day where Ross places the camera over a Black man’s (Daveed Diggs) shoulder. These scenes provide context clues: a business card with “Elwood Curtis” written on it, the glow of a computer screen, and the sounds of New York City all indicating a jump forward in time. Ross’s approach is inventive, forcing a feeling of disconnection after spending the duration of the film within the perspective of a young Elwood and a young Turner. Moving the camera over the shoulder creates a feeling of remove, as if we’re observing the effects of Nickel, not living them. In this way, Ross imbues each frame and transition between the past and present with an uneasy sensation, haunting the discoveries of the present with the ghosts of the past.   

The film’s impressionistic style recalls Ross’s groundbreaking work in his Academy Award-nominated documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, yet feels like an even more clarified exploration of person and place in Nickel Boys. Alongside editor Nicholas Monsour, Ross weaves in real-life archival footage of the Civil Rights Movement, a scene Sidney Poitier’s The Defiant Ones, and natural imagery (oranges, alligators) that firmly grounds the film in Florida. Each image is curated so thoughtfully that it explodes the definition of what narrative cinema can be. The film also often evokes Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in its use of sound, nature, and point of view to further depict history’s greatest horrors. The juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the sounds of violence (crafted perfectly by composers Alex Somers and Scott Alario) only make the events of the film feel more harrowing. When Elwood experiences violent abuse in the torture shack that the boys have dubbed the “White House” at the hands of the cruel Spencer (Hamish Linklater), Ross never leans into the exploitative shock factor that often tempts other filmmakers when depicting violence and, instead, obscures it by incorporating bright white, blurred archival footage of the faces of the boys who were abused at Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida (the real-life inspiration for Nickel Academy). In the worlds of these films, the present is inescapable from the past. While Glazer’s use of stationary cameras works as an anthropological gaze on the Hoss family, the movement of Ross’s camera through Elwood and Turner feels like the cinematic inverse. In Nickel Boys, generational violence isn’t observed, it’s felt.   

Throughout their time at Nickel, Elwood and Turner spend their time thinking of a way out of Nickel by collecting and documenting. For Elwood, it’s writing down all of his observations and the details of the abuse in his notebook in the hopes of one day closing Nickel for good. For Turner, it’s taking in the objects and details of the outside world to help him escape, the patterns of the roads, the location of the getaway bikes. With Nickel Boys, Ross 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–escaping the tight narrative constructs often found in adaptation and cracking the form open for a future generation of storytellers. By utilizing the first-person point of view and looping back to history with real images, Ross creates an original, new American masterpiece. 

Grade: A

This review is from the 2024 Telluride Film Festival where Nickel Boys had its world premiere. Amazon MGM will release the film in U.S. theaters on October 25.