Nickel Boys. 2024. USA. Directed by RaMell Ross. Screenplay by Ross, Joslyn Barnes, Colson Whitehead. With Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. DCP courtesy Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM. 140 min.
Meet Elwood. He’s the best of his class, ambitious, and wide-eyed with wonder at his family and the people who comprise his world. He’s also Black, and this is Florida in the 1960s. While out hitchhiking one day, he mistakenly ends up in a stolen vehicle. From this point forward, Elwood is also a criminal in the eyes of the state. He’s sent to the Nickel Academy for Boys, based loosely on Florida’s Dozier School Reformatory for Boys. The “school” is segregated—white students spend their days studying and playing recreational sports as any normal youngsters would, while Black students are forced into labor under abhorrent conditions and widespread abuse. The racist structure and staff at Nickel intend to break these Black “students” and make them docile before entering into the wider racism of the Civil Rights–era South. But it’s at Nickel that Elwood meets Turner, a seemingly perennial staple of the reformatory whose spirit is irrepressible, and Turner is willing to stand up for Elwood even in the face of unimaginable consequences. Led by heart-stopping breakout performances from Ethan Herisse as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner, Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s crushing Pulitzer-winner of the same name. But RaMell Ross’s film adaptation is anything but faithful—where Whitehead’s formality would seem to lend itself to the medium of film, Ross infuses the images with a highly subjective point-of-view, archival footage, and poetic montages, all of which intensify the interiority of his characters. The result is a film that both honors the source material and transforms it into a staggering work of art entirely its own.