Nickel Boys (now streaming on MGM+) is a tough but essential watch. The story of two Black teenage boys interned in a brutal reform school in Jim Crow-era 1960s Florida, the film is director RaMell Ross’ (Oscar nominee for 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening) visually experimental interpretation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, based on real-life abuses that occurred for more than a century at the Florida School for Boys, now defunct and the site of various investigations – and exhumations. Ross tells the story almost entirely from first-person point-of-view, a distinct creative choice that likely contributed to the film’s considerable acclaim, including Oscar nominations for best picture and best adapted screenplay (by Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes). It’s definitely a film you won’t soon forget.
NICKEL BOYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: You know how memories are rarely full and complete pictures of events from your life? They’re often bits and pieces, vivid or impressionistic shards that come back to you in flashes. That’s how Nickel Boys opens, with shots of an orange tree directly above, a child’s-eye view of adults drinking and smoking and playing cards, of a laughing woman playfully floating a sheet above the lens. This is Elwood’s POV. He’s played by Ethan Cole Sharp as a boy, and we don’t get a glimpse of him – or get a chance to truly orient ourselves to the film’s in-his-shoes/through-his-eyes perspective – until he faces a storefront full of TVs broadcasting a Martin Luther King Jr. speech, and we see Elwood’s reflection in the glass. The kind woman is his nana, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). It’s just the two of them. Their relationship is deep and meaningful and mutually loving.
Now Elwood is a teenager played by Ethan Herisse. His history teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), routinely encourages Elwood, who’s a strong student. Elwood works at a drugstore, kisses a girl in a 25-cent photo booth, gets cruelly prodded by an old White man’s cane as a cop stands by, hides in an alley as he listens to a seemingly violent police arrest and spots an alligator splashing in a puddle smack in the middle of the street. Is the alligator real or a surreality dropped into the memory? It’ll turn up again a few more times later in the film. Elwood strolls roadside on his way to a technical college where he’s enrolled at Mr. Hill’s urging; he hitches a ride from a friendly Black man, and I note the color of his skin because it’s the reality of this setting, as they’re soon pulled over by a White cop.
We see images from Sidney Poitier film The Defiant Ones before the narrative drops Elwood in a police car on the way to the Nickel Academy, a “reform” school for teenage boys. I use those quote marks because it’s clear there’s little “reform” happening here – the White boys live in a cushy manse and get to play football, while the Black boys are piled into barracks and schlepped to groves to harvest oranges (note that one of the boys picking fruit seems incredibly young, like five or six years old). The showers are crowded (note the one boy with massive scars on his back), the food is gross, the clothes are raggedy, the bullies are cruel and the somewhat sympathetic Black man overseeing the Black boys gives only one piece of advice: “If you know when to say ‘Yes sir,’ which is always, you’ll be OK.” Elwood keeps to himself and stays quiet. He observes another kid from afar, and the assessment he hears is, “He’s half-Mexican. They don’t know what side of Nickel to put him in.”
Mercifully, Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), who’s been at Nickel for a while. They become friends, and Turner immediately helps Elwood acclimate. We feel momentary disorientation as we suddenly see Elwood center-frame, and realize that we’ll experience significant portions of this film from Turner’s POV as well – but you, like Elwood, will acclimate to the rhythms of the experience. We watch through Elwood’s eyes as one of the bullies clocks him, and they both end up being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and taken to a shack on the reformatory grounds. Elwood sits in a grungy room, sweating and listening to the awful sounds of the superintendent (Hamish Linklater) brutally punishing the other boy – imagining what’s happening is far worse than actually seeing it. Elwood ends up in the infirmary. Hattie tries to visit him but is turned away. Turner tells him that what happened in the shed is typical, and likely on the lower end of the atrocities happening at Nickel. Some boys are shoved into the “sweatbox,” a sweltering dark room, for days at a time. And some are taken away and never seen again. When anyone asks about them, those in charge just say the boys ran away.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Nickel Boys has a lot in common with depictions of mid-century-American racial conflict like Detroit or Selma – and almost nothing in common with other first-person-POV films, the most notable being handheld-camera found-footage horror or stuff inspired by video games (see Hardcore Henry). But the combination of its uncompromising adherence to a specific and distinctive point-of-view and its depiction of humans practicing vile inhumanity is remarkably similar to Jonathan Glazer’s dramatic staring-down of the Nazis who ran Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest.
Performance Worth Watching: This isn’t to diminish the work of the cast here – Herisse and Wilson are nothing short of absolutely convincing as the film’s anchors – but Nickel Boys tends to transcend classical film acting, putting the burden on Ross to execute his ideas with significant visual manipulations and detail. The director’s performance is what you’ll notice first, and unlike other examples of such, Ross’ work is nearly egoless.
Memorable Dialogue: Mr. Hill hands Elwood a pamphlet for a technical college and pitches it thusly: “Imagine a textbook with nothing to cross out.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Some audiences will wrestle with whether Nickel Boys truly puts us inside the minds of its protagonists, or feels too gimmicky to achieve full immersion. It’s a subjective argument, but I assert that it’s highly effective, essentially forcing your perspective through a “set of eyes,” a narrow lens shooting in the nearly square 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The world is small as a Black boy in the Jim Crow South, and even tighter when stuck in a place run by racist men who designed the institution to reflect their ignorance and execute their cruelty.
The result of this technique can be overwhelming – your eyes can’t wander to the corners of the screen or even consider another POV, and establishing shots are so significantly constricted, there’s no “appreciating” the cinematography of the setting like in a most films. There are moments when Ross steps back to more traditional, but still keenly observational perspectives, in flashforward sequences in which Daveed Davis plays the adult Elwood, who owns a moving business in New York City, and, in the late 2010s, despairingly reads news articles about the unmarked graves found at Nickel Academy.
Any examination of Nickel Boys inevitably begins with discussions about form and technique – such is the nature of modern cinema, which often employs less challenging styles and perspectives. And Ross’ creative choices are calculated to challenge his audience in ways that other, similar stories of gross injustice and dehumanization don’t, which pushes the film past notions of “Black trauma porn,” into new, artistically vital avenues. There’s always the worry that for some, the film will eclipse its messaging with technique. But a stronger argument is that Ross tightly ties the message to technique, thus creating a more direct cinematic experience: He shows more than he tells, and that’s the purest purpose of filmmaking.
Our Call: Although Nickel Boys’ form will limit its audience, those who see it won’t soon forget it. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
