‘Nickel Boys’ redefines the power of perspective

Every once in a while, there comes a film that breaks your preconceptions of how a story can be told. It might not happen right away, but RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys” is destined to join those ranks. It’s one of the most important films of the year, both in terms of the substance it carries over from the pages of its source material and in how it elicits your emotional response to it.

Imagery is Ross’s weapon of choice, with many of the words in Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel being either reduced or omitted altogether. But he doesn’t stop there, opting to fully dismantle the debate of objective vs. subjective within storytelling and literally placing us within the eyes of the two leads: Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson).

While video games and virtual reality have brought the first-person perspective to televisions for years, it’s still a relative stranger to the silver screen, especially once you consider the added challenge of the audience not being able to control where and when they look. Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes’s adaptation goes even further once the layers of time start to fold on top of each other, trapping us in a series of undefinable dreams and nightmares, each one crashing into the other without warning.

The central timeline places itself within 1962 Tallahassee. We see and hear the world through Elwood’s eyes and ears: A television playing Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, his reflection in a steaming iron, a white officer giving him a dirty look, and his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) raining tinsel upon him as he lays under the Christmas tree. These sequences play out through the prism of memory, all of them fragmented and extremely brief. They create the dots that we connect through our history and understanding of the time period. We only remember bits and pieces of our past, but the experiences are carried with us to the end of time.

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Elwood’s experience worsens when he accepts a ride from a kindly stranger. The car turns out to be stolen, a fact that the aggressive officer probably used to pull over any African American he could that day. Elwood’s punishment is a trip to the Nickel Academy reform school, a place where the term “school” is nothing more than window dressing. The White and Black kids are segregated into different buildings, the latter group mostly all here for some concocted reason or another, their ages ranging from preschool to high school. What could a preschooler have done to deserve this level of punishment? 

Turner is the Red to Elwood’s Andy Dufresne, quickly offering the sobering tips of what life is like here. The system is rigged, and a few boys disappearing every once in a while is not something out of the ordinary. This place is a microcosm of America itself, pushing down its most disenfranchised citizens while simultaneously scolding them for not being able to climb the barbed ladder.

Cinematographer Jomo Fray’s camera stays locked within the eyes of the two boys, freely moving between them. This deprivation of the traditional cinematic gaze makes them blank slates, especially Elwood, whom we don’t get a good look at until over an hour into the movie. There’s a newfound sense of discovery as we witness the good and the bad through them, everything real enough that you can’t excuse it as just a piece of entertainment. Whitehead’s novel was based on the Dozier School for Boys, a place where bodies are still being uncovered.

Ellis-Taylor often provides those small semblances of warmth as the kindly matriarch. Her beaming eyes and smile nestle into your heart when they’re fixed directly at you. A smattering of scenes with Daveed Diggs re-contextualizes the events of the past, with the camera now fixed on his back as if he were in a film by the Dardenne brothers.

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In one of those later scenes, two of the men reopen their past at school. They talk as if they went to war together and came back with PTSD, with reintegration into society being a constant struggle. A more Hollywood-ized version of this story would make this moment feel a little hokey, but Ross’s vision makes it authentic. They, and, by extension, we, have been on a tumultuous journey in a way that we’ve never seen before.

“Nickel Boys” is an Amazon MGM Studios release. It is now playing in select theaters.

Eden Prairie resident Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays and more. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.