Some movies shine brighter than others. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” a moving film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is polished to a remarkable shine. Its assurance comes like a strong breeze on a sticky Southern summer day, and it tells a boldly conceived story of two black boys named Elwood and Turner, who lived during the height of segregation in Florida. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a bright, idealistic boy who is mistakenly sent to the abusive confines of a reform school called Nickel Academy. Turner (Brandon Wilson) is the brilliant friend he makes in the dark passages of those days. “Nickel Boys” takes viewers into the perspective of these black teenagers with impressive style and unwavering confidence.
This is not a movie that takes you by the hand. Filmed primarily switching points of view between Turner and Elwood, Ross and his stellar cinematographer Jomo Fray teach the viewer how to see and feel the world through black eyes. If the lesson is not learned, it is not the film’s fault. It’s the same bold, honest strategy that Ross deployed in his documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” a film that similarly hoped the viewer would identify with a southern black town by observing its daily movements. The restructuring of that desire here, in a fictional realm, the director’s first foray into that mode of storytelling, is fraught with risk. With “Nickel Boys,” a clear masterpiece held together by visual splendor and idiosyncratic performances, the challenge is worth the reward.
Our immersion in the world of the film begins from the beginning with a kinetic montage of warm images (a sparkling Christmas tree, children climbing bars, the faint hint of parents who will soon abandon the protagonist) that reveal the early years of life of Elwood Curtis (played in these younger scenes by Ethan Cole Sharp). She lives with her loving grandmother Hattie (a touching Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in Tallahassee, Florida, where she works at a motel as a maid. While Elwood knows times are dangerous, the brilliance of the civil rights movement, spurred by the words of Martin Luther King Jr, has given him optimism that the worst is over for black people. It’s a notion that neither his grandmother nor his teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmy Fails), a former Freedom Rider, dispels. It is the latter, impressed by Elwood’s desire to contribute to the movement through funds and protests, who tells him about a local university that allows the enrollment of high school students. One day, on the way to that school, Elwood hitches a ride with a stranger who has unknowingly stolen a car. When the police catch the two together, they treat Elwood as an accomplice and send him to Nickel.
The fervent hope instilled by his grandmother serves Elwood no good at Nickel, where the pastoral landscape belies the terror that lurks behind its sturdy walls. If not for Turner’s appearance, one gets the feeling that Elwood would have quickly perished in such an unforgiving environment. It is through her tantalizing gaze that we see Elwood. Sometimes the camera switches between them, other times it briefly separates from them. Both young actors, Herisse and Wilson, hold together the emotional tone of the film. Even though they barely appear physically together in scenes, you can feel each other’s presence in the other’s eyes, expression, and posture. In a film that isn’t willing to test the viewer’s empathy (you’re expected to care about these kids not because film language tells you to, but because they’re human), these actors hold the viewer’s attention.
Similarly, the non-linear structure, which takes the film decades into the future to an older Elwood (Daveed Diggs), who is seen from behind, breaks us from the debilitating pressure exerted by a type of racism that has only slightly diminished in the present. . Likewise, the use of archival material, such as black and white photographs of imprisoned black children, black children celebrating parties, and visions of Apollo 8, alters our interactions with the historical record of white ownership that the film confronts.
The writing work of Ross and screenwriter Joslyn Barnes, along with Fray, is nothing short of incredible. They take what seems like a nearly unfilmable book and reframe Whitehead’s laid-back poetics into a film whose cinematic prowess overwhelms the viewer with images that would be simply beautiful if they weren’t so disturbing. There are many scenes that balance beauty with melancholy: an encounter between an adult Elwood and a former Nickel inmate in a bar; comforting hugs from Hattie; rows of lush orange groves where even the smallest black children are put to work. Within each frame of “Nickel Boys” is not only the recreation of a moment (its rigid air, its suffocating aroma and its hardened touch), but also the texture of the discarded. That integration of the abusive outside world into the internal perspective is what gives this use of POV a life that is not a gimmick, but rather a fully realized experience that draws on and deconstructs decades of cinematic grammar.
The film’s politics undergo similar upheaval. Elwood believes that any obstacle can be overcome with resolve, such as that practiced in nonviolent protests. Turner, on the other hand, is a realist. He believes that simple survival is the key. Their relationship mirrors that of Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in “The Defiant Ones,” a film that “Nickel Boys” references several times. “The Defiant Ones” is, of course, a figment of white Hollywood’s imagination. He says racism could well be resolved through mutual respect and some sacrifice on the part of the black man. “Nickel Boys,” on the other hand, makes no such allusions. Liberation is a difficult path. And “Nickel Boys” knows that any conception of freedom has a price.
This review was submitted from the New York Film Festival. The film opens on October 25.