Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross)

By: Adam Freed 

It can’t hurt the quality of a production when it is based on acclaimed source material.  To this end, author Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys presents an outstanding opportunity for a meaningful page to screen adaptation.  The result of this effort is RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, a brave film that is as courageously directed as anything since Yorgos Lanthimos’ sublime Poor Things (2023).  Whitehead based his novel, and the film’s script, on the Dozier School for Boys, a painful reminder that in the Jim Crow South, mutated forms of slavery lived on well into the middle of the 20th century.  Standing in for Dozier in the fictionalized story is Nickel Academy, a quasi reform school for “troubled” youth, which under the auspices of “rehabilitation and education” used southern young men (predominantly African American) as unpaid labor to tend the agricultural fields of Florida’s panhandle.

Although Nickel Boys is far from being an experimental film, RaMell Ross fearlessly elects to weave his narrative using a visual first person POV almost exclusively.  The result is an astounding first hour in which audiences live the tortuous life of central character Elwood solely from his perspective.  This decision provides an unrivaled sense of the pain, shame, and difficulty felt by the young black community in early 1960’s Florida.  What compounds a sense of technical wonder at Nickel Boys creation is the director's bold decision to shift point of view more than once throughout the film.  Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Nickel Academy ally Turner (Brandon Wilson) carry the bulk of the film’s screen time, which speaks to the quality of the performances by the two young actors.  Shifting POV mid film is the type of decision simply doesn’t work in most cases, and yet Whitehead’s script and Ross’ vision of the film team to make the unconventional feel essential.  Audiences in search of big budget formulaic entertainment be warned that this is not a film for the faint of heart, or for those unwilling to bend their perspectives on the meaning of impactful narrative structure. For those who remain patient with Ross’ unorthodox choices, the payoff is one of massive profundity.   

Target Score 9/10: Nickel Boys is far more than a story about the evils of the Jim Crow South.  RaMell Ross’ film is daring work of visual art, captivating from start to end, allowing for a final act that pieces together what should become essential American storytelling. 

This capsule review of Nickel Boys is included in Movie Archer’s coverage of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival.