Nickel Boys (2024)

Nickel Boys is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel, based on the infamous revelations of the Dozier School in Florida, a reform school that turned out to be highly abusive of its wards, up to and including unmarked graves of boys murdered and buried there. Their parents were told they ran away. The Nickel Boys story focuses on two Black teens sent to the fictional Nickel Academy in the mid-1960s, during the height of the Civil Rights era and the beginning of US involvement in Vietnam’s civil war. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) strike up a friendship that helps them endure and survive the harsh miseries. Director and cowriter RaMell Ross indulges so much film school technique getting there (though note he never studied at a film school) that it’s tempting to call the picture experimental. The roving, fluid, handheld camera, pointed everywhere and going in and out of focus, plunges us into the story directly, into the cold water at the deep end. Nickel Boys is so impressive to watch that in many ways the details of the narrative come by osmosis. The camera often just embodies Elwood’s point of view and as often hovers close to him, right behind, like someone crowding him on the subway. It comes unstuck in time as well, as Kurt Vonnegut might explain it, following Elwood 10 years after these events and in the present day as well, before returning to Nickel in the ‘60s again and further hopping around. Nickel Boys has little time for explanations, it’s definitely confusing, but Ross distributes his clues lucidly enough to help us keep up, which by itself gets to be thrilling in a way. I’m not always sure what the creative camera contributes to the story—a second viewing may help with that—but it’s certainly pure dazzling cinema, exuberant and celebratory, never dreary as these stories too often threaten to become. Numerous black & white clips from the 1958 picture The Defiant Ones, with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts shackled together, seem to be making the point. Unfortunately, the high technique battles a little as distractions from the larger themes and dramas of racism and brutality, and how far we have not come. It might be exactly what Ross was intending because I came away from Nickel Boys with the sense of having experienced something intense, something more than just another sad story from the workaday South.