Review: Nickel Boys (2024)

In its best moments, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys made me think about Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. It’s a lofty comparison, but Nickel Boys has a poetic approach to its imagery and storytelling, one that prioritizes perspective and memory and the fleeting moments that comprise a person’s life over more conventional formal narrative approaches. It’s a beautiful movie about troubling subject matter, one that could have easily gone off the rails but that ends up striking a delicate balancing act between formal innovation and narrative authenticity.

Adapted from the Colson Whitehead novel, Nickel Boys is about two black teens, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who bond at an abusive reform school in Florida in the early 1960s. Based on the plot description, I wasn’t enthused about Nickel Boys as many recent movies about racial oppression are rather formulaic and more didactic than poetic. But RaMell Ross isn’t an ordinary filmmaker, so Nickel Boys isn’t an ordinary literary adaptation touching on social issues. Instead of a cheaply progressive rant about how bad the past was, the film is rather an immersive experience of that past in all its flaws. To achieve this immersion, Ross takes a radical formal approach: the entire film is told in point of view shots from the perspective of either Elwood or Turner.

Total commitment to the first-person perspective is a bold approach, one that has only been attempted a handful of times in cinema, and usually not for the entire run of a feature film. For instance, Delmer Daves’ film noir Dark Passage (1947) is famously shot as POV for the first half while Humphrey Bogart’s character undergoes facial surgery, but the second half has a more conventional approach with typical shot construction. Nickel Boys doesn’t break from its approach, except in sparse flash forwards of Elwood as an adult played by Daveed Diggs. However, even in these moments, the camera watches from a fixed perspective behind Elwood’s head. Ross and his team, including cinematographer Jomo Fray, create a clear formal limitation and carry it through the entire work, which is admirable.

Limitation can be the catalyst for creativity and Nickel Boys is wonderfully creative, from the expressionistic moments of Elwood’s memories to the haunting ways it depicts the injustices at the reform school known as Nickel Academy. In the early going, the film flits between young Elwood and old, with short shots of memories that seem burned into Elwood’s mind. One shot has Elwood underneath the Christmas tree as his grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), decorates it, spots him, and sprinkles tinsel on him. Because we’re fixed to Elwood’s POV, we see the tinsel come down, the light bouncing off the silver, the lights on the tree flaring. It’s gorgeously shot, but the performance is perfectly in sync too: the look of recognition on Hattie’s face, the surprise that breaks into a loving smile with a playful twinkle in her eye as she drops the tinsel, tells us so much about their relationship.

Later scenes take a different but equally creative approach. At the Nickel Academy, the perspective starts to jump between Elwood’s and Turner’s, offering different perspectives on events at the school while also intimately linking the two characters through the shared formal approach and their shared experience of indignities at the school. The film also incorporates horror elements in how it depicts the abuses at the school. Elwood quickly learns that the school administrator, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), is known to take misbehaving black students into a back cabin and punish them in sadistic ways. But because of the limited perspective, we only learn what Elwood learns about this back cabin, which creates a terrifying aura around this place of punishment. Even when Elwood eventually finds himself there, the cabin remains terrifying because Elwood’s panicked perspective is so blinkered by his own anxiety and lack of context; he hears the sounds coming from the back and eventually we see how Spencer tortures the students, but it’s never fully clear how the place truly operates.

The sequence recalls found footage horror in its radically limited perspective and how this limitation creates inescapable tension. It also recalls Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019), primarily the late scene where that film’s central character goes to his execution and Malick adopts a POV perspective as he walks into a building with a guillotine waiting inside. The approach, shared by Nickel Boys and the late scene in A Hidden Life, forces the audience to confront evil head on, refusing us the comfort of remaining removed from what is happening on screen because we’re so formally tied to the character. The formal approach also allows for an ambiguous authenticity to come through as well, one where we are not allowed an objective perspective of these events. It’s proof of how Nickel Boys is reflective, but not prescriptive, illuminating about the past precisely because it seeks to imbed itself in it without offering the perspective (and judgment) of the present.

Of course, there are drawbacks to such an approach. It limits how scenes can be presented and the perspectives of characters outside the central two. We learn a bit about Elwood’s grandmother, and a few other boys at the school, notably one tragic student with a talent for boxing, but we’re never allowed to really dig into their lives because we’re so fixed to Elwood’s and Turner’s. Furthermore, the visual approach calibrates the performances in a way where some of the typical looseness that you might find in an American indie is absent. The actors have to play to the camera at all times and don’t benefit from being observed in a candid manner; the camera is so present and representative of a character that they cannot ignore its presence. By virtue of its formal approach, Nickel Boys is highly stylized in almost every element. The actors might affect naturalistic performances, but they are ultimately playing directly to the camera in ways that aren’t entirely natural. This isn’t a fatal issue—the performances are still good—but simply a result of following the film’s strict formal rules.

Nickel Boys expounds a lesson on the injustices of the past by placing us in the shoes of the characters. It’s about representation and identity, but not in the recent Hollywood way where the characters simply reflect the experiences of the people watching the film in the cinema. Rather, the film represents life through the eyes of the people that experienced it, and asks the audience in the cinema to leave their own perspectives behind to adopt the characters’ view. It’s an invitation to see through another’s eyes, literalizing the empathetic power of film.

8 out of 10

Nickel Boys (2024, USA)

Directed by RaMell Ross; written by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes, based on The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead; starring Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Jimmie Fails, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

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