Nickel Boys
We close out 2024 with a review of one of the best movies of the year.
.Nickel Boys is an astonishing work of adaptation, translating Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys from page to screen with a deftness most movies based on books can only hope to achieve. The film is shot almost entirely from the first-person perspective of its two main characters (the cinematographer is Jomo Fray, who shot last year’s sublime All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt). All Dirt Roads . . . told its story through incidental details with a particular focus on the hands of its characters, which we see more than their faces.
Nickel Boys, in its turn, maintains the same intense focus on details that might otherwise fall into the margins: the texture of sunlight on the skin of an orange, icing folding in on itself as it’s scraped off a butter knife, the way shoes tumble over one another when they’re arranged in a pile. Fray’s compositions take notice not just of people’s hands but also of their feet; we mark the kinds of shoes they wear about as frequently as we see the expressions on their faces. It’s about the way that these characters walk in society, how they carry themselves, and how they treat others.
The film opens with Elwood (Ethan Herisse) as he grows up in Tallahassee in 1967 with his grandmother. He is a bright student, and beloved, with a promising future. On his way to college classes at a nearby technical school, he’s given a ride by someone who turns out to be driving a stolen car. Wrong place, wrong time: Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy, a barbaric reformatory for boys. There he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), who tells Elwood how the school works, how to keep his head down, and how to stay close to the margins to avoid notice—and punishment. The goal isn’t to learn but to survive.
Director RaMell Ross (previously best known for his work on the startling documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening) approaches the story with purpose and assurance, alternating perspectives between Elwood and Turner as the two boys get to know each other. Some of the sequences feel incidental at first, but as with Fray’s cinematography, the incidental elements are the substance of the film. This is a story about people who have fallen through the cracks of society, unwanted or forgotten or abandoned by a justice system that was not built with them in mind. Turner is pragmatic: he’s familiar with how Nickel works. Elwood is more idealistic: he has a grandmother on the outside who loves him, and before he was sent away, he’d just begun to participate in protests and civil disobedience. He is convinced that if he lives the right way, he’s going to change the world.
Most of our time is spent on the inside, in the shoes and inside the heads of Elwood and Turner. The longer the two spend inside Nickel Academy, the better they understand each other—as do we, by extension. The camera switches perspectives as the two talk to each other, so that each addresses the camera directly. We never see Turner and Elwood together from the outside, except in a startling reflection shot from above as Elwood watches himself and his friend in a mirror overhead. Instead, we’re invited into the intimacy of their relationship with each other in a way that puts the audience directly into the relationship with them, with no intermediaries. We’re asked to be active participants, listening in the place of one or the other as the two talk. It’s a heady, bracing feeling.
Later, when the movie skips ahead in time years later to another perspective (played by Daveed Diggs), we partake in the story not through the eyes of the person we’re following, but a removed perspective, just outside the back of his head. The shot has been filmed in close third-person, jarring after the immediacy of Elwood and Turner’s conversations in the past. It’s as though this character is living outside his own body, watching himself, haunting and haunted by the person he is and could have been.
Elwood and Turner are haunted too: by each other, by the cruelty of the other boys and teachers at Nickel, and by the justice system that failed them. Ross foregrounds Elwood and Turner so that we’re always aware of their individual personhood first. Violence is everyday and ordinary at the school, but Ross presents it as an aberration despite its constant presence, the injustice of it hanging over Nickel like a curse. Instead of showing the physical injustice outright, Ross frames Nickel as a force that warps the identities of the children who are ostensibly under its care. The bullies become worse; the ones who have slipped into the cracks become wedged there. But they are still people, and Ross never lets us forget about it, inviting us to look for faces looking back at us—ourselves, and the characters whose eyes we’re looking through—in every surface, in every reflection.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★★
Nickel Boys is in limited release now, expanding to more theaters in the new year.