‘Nickel Boys’: Review

Dir. RaMell Ross. US. 2024, 140 mins.

Two Black boys and a brutal penitentiary: generational racism and cruelty, pride and Black heritage and Jim Crow. RaMell Ross conducts Nickel Boys as an orchestra, each instrument powering a narrative that sounds one painful note – at times faltering, ultimately devastating. Ross’s bold experiment in sound and fractured visuals flutters through memory, using multiple devices to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 2019 which was rooted in real-life abuse and disenfranchisement. Nickel Boys is about societal evil, certainly, and carries a score which almost bites the skin of the audience as a reminder of that pain, but it is the tenderness at its core that deals the emotional blow.

A work of artistic daring

Nickel Boys is a rare film, a work of artistic daring which takes Whitehead’s novel and unpicks, reassembles and layers it, paying no mind to traditional structure and forcing the viewer to work at the narrative through a dazzling display of conceptual high-mindedness which often occludes it. It makes its own rules, and breaks them. It’s very exciting from a cinematic perspective, and that’s partly the point: this story needs its own voice, it needs to live, in order to best respect the people who lived it. Destined for wide acclaim and awards, Nickel Boys follows last year’s Zone Of Interest in its rousing vindication of cinema’s potential to find new ways of drilling into the heart of the matter. 

From the very start, Ross asserts his artistic voice. The director of 2018’s documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening has set himself some strict POV rules, to start with, which have the effect of making the film intensely personal. We only see from the eye of the beholder: initially one child, watching a late-night poker game from eye-height; a bedsheet being thrown over his head by hard-working but loving grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor); fragments of life in Frenchtown, Tallahassee, from 1962, three years before the final Jim Crow laws were repealed.

Reflections – in shop windows, mirrors, TV sets with the face of Martin Luther King (the ‘how long/not long speech’ of 1965) – show us Ellwood Curtis as he grows up to be his grandmother’s pride and joy. He’s smart. He’s starting to be politically active. His teacher thinks he can go to a free Black technical college. But you don’t need to see the crocodile in the street to know that life is ready to eat Ellwood alive. One wrong step – a lift in a car driven by the wrong Black man – and it’s over, quicker than those jaws can snap shut.

The Nickel reformatory is based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, a savage institution that eventually yielded over 100 unmarked graves. Here the POV will intermittently – but never predictably – move between Ellwood (Ethan Herisse) and his savvier new friend Turner (Brandon Wilson). If what has come before is flickering memories and sounds, the Nickel penitentiary is so solid you can count the threads on the dirty shirts of its segregated inmates.

Yet Ross, writing with Joslyn Barnes, remains elusive. He moves incidents to the side of the screen, half-witnessed, never leading to the next scene. You can never settle in. You don’t understand Nickel in the same way you wouldn’t have understood it if you came there at 15 years of age. The fear is pervasive in this film: Ross doesn’t need an abuser to stand in front of a class and deliver a soliliqy to make its evil feel real. Soon, one of the film’s many temporal shifts will take us to Ellwood in a more recent time, but now the camera is looking over his hunched back.

Ross brings the sensibility of an artist to cinema (perhaps a little like Steve McQueen on Hunger) and makes it yield to this story. There’s tenderness and a sense of the beauty in the everyday, of nature, familial love, fraternity between the two boys, and the roots of Black culture out of the segregationist South; pride, suffering, cruelty, guilt.

In once sequence featuring an adult Ellwood, the TV in the background is showing a marathon, which is rewound and played and put into reverse, shredding the scene and bringing us into Ellwood’s destroyed mind. Multiple media sources root the film in an excellent sense of time and place. Production design in Grandma’s house gives Ellwood a secure sanctuary of amber light. Night-time in Frenchtown bears the colours of that Rockwell painting, but none of the security. The clothes worn by the inmates at Nickel disintegrate with their bodies and their punches and their psyches. Lensing by Jomo Fray is empathetic and entirely at Ross’s service, and music by Scott Alario and Alex Somers is not like a score you’ve heard before – or possibly want to experience again. Yet its clear that Nickel Boys will bear up to – if not ask for – repeated screenings.

Nickel Boys goes out through Amazon on limited release on October 25. Apart from a strong performance from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and Daveed Diggs with much less screen time, it is not a film that can be marketed on the names of makers or stars, even though it will be the making of Herisse and Wilson. It’s that rare film that is entirely of its own mind, stands on its own feet, and marches out, unafraid. It has antecedents: without Wong Kar-wai we wouldn’t have Barry Jenkins; without him, there wouldn’t be a Nickel Boys; without Zone of Interest we might not be ready for it. It’s time.