Nickel Boys: RaMell Ross’ radically inventive second feature

A Florida orange hangs sweetly from its tree: the camera pans left, and it becomes clear that the person gazing at it is horizontal, lying on the grass below. Assuming this person’s point of view, where it remains for much of the film, the director invites the audience to witness the sun warming their outstretched arm. It’s a sensory experience, one that asks viewers to engage through their bodies first. Director RaMell Ross trusts that emotional and political identification with his characters will follow.

Ross’s inventive and supremely beautiful second feature, co-written with producer Joslyn Barnes, is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel of 2019. Both the film and the book weave a fictional narrative around the real-life horror story of the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Florida that was shut down in 2011 due to the abuse that flourished within its grounds. The story’s protagonist, Elwood (Ethan Herisse), is an intelligent and kind Black teenager living in segregated Florida in the 1960s. En route to his first day at a local Black college, he hitches a ride in an emerald turquoise Impala, shyly telling its dodgy driver his age (“Almost 17, sir.”). But the car is stolen: Elwood is arrested, and sent to the Nickel Academy, where the itinerary involves manual labour and beatings. As Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) tearfully puts it to their lawyer, “He just got in the wrong car.”

Those familiar with Ross’s previous feature Hale County, This Morning, This Evening (2018), a lyrical documentary about the African American community in Alabama’s Hale County, will be pleased to see the director is still experimenting with form. Ross has a singular way of seeing and an eye for the grace present in ordinary daily life, and Nickel Boys begins with tender images of Elwood’s early years, populated by laughter and community. Adults drink beer and play cards around a kitchen table; tinsel rains down as his smiling grandmother decorates their Christmas tree; the young Elwood grazes his knees playing on a climbing frame in a park. We don’t need to see the actor portraying him to know that Elwood is a child, though Ross confirms this by allowing a glimpse of his reflection in the polished metal of Hattie’s iron.

As a teenager, Elwood buries his head in comic books, ears pricking at Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s voice on TV. “ You shall reap what you sow,” says Dr King. The night before Elwood is carted off to Nickel, Hattie calls her grandson into the kitchen to enjoy a slice of cake. “Your portion is pain,” she says to herself, as she cuts Elwood a slice, scraping every last lick of frosting from the knife.

Neither intelligence nor ambition can protect Elwood from the racist society that governs him, as Turner (Brandon Wilson), his new friend at Nickel, explains while they paint a local woman’s porch. Elwood tells Turner that he has been keeping a diary of his experiences at Nickel, optimistic that it might outrage hearts and minds. But for the more cynical Turner, the “game’s rigged”. He lists the options for escaping their fate: a positive court ruling (“a miracle”), death (entirely possible), or making a run for it. Flashforwards that show the adult Elwood in New York interrupt the narrative and transform the film into a mystery. Whitehead worked from real oral histories of the men who survived the Dozier School, and Ross and Barnes, who collaborated on Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, also bring a documentary element to their telling. Archive material is used to create parallels between this story and the very real past. In one clip, a group of Black people stand at the mouth of a crevasse, the gap slightly too wide to jump. Elsewhere, scenes from Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) encourage the audience to make a more explicit link between Elwood’s stoicism and loyal nature and Sidney Poitier’s.

Part way through the film, Ross changes perspective, switching to Turner’s point of view. This is true to the novel, but it ’s also fitting that these two friends are the only two characters who can ‘see’ each other. Ross’s choice to lock the audience into his characters’ literal point of view is a risky intervention, with a radical payoff. Instead of using voiceover narration to tell the audience how Elwood and Turner are feeling, Ross simply shows how each boy sees the world, drawing attention to where their gaze drifts. He prioritises their individual humanity, by illustrating their inner lives. The film intimates that feeling as them, rather than for them, might be a step towards solidarity.

► Nickel Boys is available in UK cinemas from 3 January 2025.