Nickel Boys has been nominated for an Oscar. Photo / L. Kasimu Harris
Nickel Boys has been nominated for an Oscar. Photo / L. Kasimu Harris
Review by Ty Burr
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
A daring visual approach powers a gorgeous film about an ugly chapter in history, Nickel Boys is nominated for two Academy Awards and is now available to stream in New Zealand.
Warning: Mentions sexual assault and violence.
In Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross reinvents the cinema as a language of hope.
Hope for what? Survival, connection, bearing witness to historical crimes, the sacrament of peering into another person’s soul.
In a season of awards-conscious trauma dramas, a culture’s necessary medicines, this one floats like poetry and stings like a slap.
It is one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year, and it is also a tragedy that left me weeping for two men, the US and the world.
Starting in 2012, investigators exhumed more than 50 unmarked graves and identified nearly 100 deaths at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reform institution in the Florida Panhandle that operated from 1900 to 2011.
By far the majority of the bodies were of young Black men; former “students” have testified over the years to beatings, whippings, rapes and killings, with some victims as young as 9.
In 2019, The Underground Railroad author Colson Whitehead fictionalised the Dozier School into Nickel Academy for his novel The Nickel Boys. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.
Now comes a film version of the book, directed and written (with Joslyn Barnes) by Ross, whose only previous feature is the luminous 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening.
Like that film, Nickel Boys is impressionistic, as attuned to the natural and human-made worlds as the people who inhabit them.
It’s a style that evokes the work of director Terrence Malick, though without the studied voice-over reveries of The Tree of Life and other Malick movies.
Ross knows well the struggles and inequities his young Black men face in a system designed to crush them, but he’s incapable of denying them the possibility of transcendence, through one another and the mundane beauty of life itself.
Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson star in the acclaimed Nickel Boys.
With visual daring, Ross tells this story entirely through the eyes of his two main characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) - a bright young man hitchhiking to college and a promising future when he makes the mistake of getting into a stolen car - and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who becomes Elwood’s friend and protector from the harsh realities of “the Nickel.”
That “I Am a Camera” subjective-POV approach has been tried over the years - the film noir Lady in the Lake (1947), The Blair Witch Project (1999) - and it usually turns into a gimmick after 10 minutes. Not here.
The time period is the early 1960s, and Elwood’s perspective initially glows with the naive idealism of the civil rights struggle and the proud hopes of his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), the high school teacher who has mentored him.
He’s certain the mistake of his arrest will be realised and he’ll be on his way. Instead, he’s quickly and brutally reminded by the other teenage inmates and by Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater), the corrupt White administrator of the academy, that he’s in the grips of a system that couldn’t care less about another Black body.
We’ve been watching the movie through Elwood’s eyes up to this point, but then Ross replays a cafeteria confrontation from Turner’s point of view and we *see* Elwood for the first time.
As Nickel Boys progresses and the bond between earnest Elwood and cynical Turner deepens, their conversations become a form of intimacy with each other and with us, each man’s eyes looking into the camera lens in direct address.
Other characters rarely meet our gaze: a White prison trusty (Fred Hechinger) with whom the boys resell the academy’s supplies to local merchants; a hulking bully (Luke Tennie) who’s asked by Mr. Spencer to throw an inter-academy boxing match; the men who accompany Elwood to a cabin called the White House, where an industrial fan can’t drown out the sounds and screams of the whippings.
Only Hattie embraces Ross’s camera and everyone in it with unfailing and abundant love.
Elwood is quickly reminded he's in the grips of a system that couldn’t care less about another Black body. Photo / Orion Pictures, Amazon MGM Studios
Every so often, Nickel Boys jumps ahead to future decades - the 1970s, the ’90s, the new millennium - in which the back of the head of one of the boys, now grown (Daveed Diggs), fills the screen as he cycles through girlfriends, starts a moving company and is drawn to news reports of the shuttered academy.
One senses we’re seeing him from the POV of the other boy’s ghost, and certainly there are phantoms among the living. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the film comes when this survivor is approached in a bar by a fellow Nickel boy, adult but still broken, and we glimpse like an optical illusion a child that once was.
Both the paradox of Nickel Boys and its greatness are embedded in the style of its telling, a direct gaze of experience that can only take so much. The academy’s horrors are glanced at sideways but rarely faced head-on; Jomo Fray’s cinematography and the score by Scott Alario and Alex Somers emphasise the perfect radiance of this life we are gifted, but it’s a radiance Ross knows is cursed by human imperfection and by the urge to punish people for the color of their skin.
Nickel Boys testifies to sins of the past, to rememberings of the present and to reconciliations of the future; to a career taking flight and to ghosts being laid gently to rest. Mostly, though, it says: Look. Look at this world. Look at the paradise we could have had, could still have, if we only chose to deserve it.
Nickel Boys is available to stream in New Zealand on Prime Video.
