At one point in Nickel Boys, Elwood, a young Black boy in Civil Rights-era Florida, glimpses Martin Luther King Jr. in front of a supermarket and takes off, running across the middle of the street to greet him.
Turner, his best friend, chases behind him. When he catches Elwood, he asks him what’s wrong. Elwood smiles, bashful. Turner looks over to see a cardboard cut-out of MLK. We’ve encountered the preacher multiple times in the film – on a vinyl record, through a window display of a dozen televisions, from teachers who misquote his sermons. Yet for a moment, to Elwood, it looked like he was really there, just a few feet away, next to the produce stand in the middle of some city street. The most brilliant part of this scene is not the choice to literalise the two boy’s vastly different relationships to the most visible, idolised black man in America, nor is it the fact that this scene immediately follows the one time we will ever see both boys on-screen at the same time. It’s that, for a split-second, that cut-out really does look like King.
The entirety of RaMell Ross’ narrative feature debut is shot in first-person. This is the kind of conceit that feels too experimental, too grandiose, to make it past a pitch meeting, let alone result in a successful film. Yet the first of many miracles of Nickel Boys is that it exists, a $20 million movie with the kind of formal rigour typically reserved for underground and installation art.
Ross’ feature debut, the non-narrative documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, photographed contemporary black life in the Southeastern United States with an unparalleled impressionistic intimacy and an enviable knack for identifying and capturing spontaneously beautiful imagery. That same ethos proves equally fruitful here. His second film follows Elwood (played by the monumentally gifted Ethan Herisse), an idealistic teenage Freedom Fighter sent to the Nickel reform school after being wrongfully arrested for car theft.
The opening half-hour, however, is a procession of loosely connected vignettes from Elwood’s youth. Ross invites the audience to embody Elwood through a sensory simulation. Dreamlike moments of apparent happenstance, the kind normally found in an edit amidst hours of unused footage, are engineered wholesale from Ross’ imagination, with a large- scale period-accurate recreation of 1960s Tallahassee to match. Ross composes such painterly shots in a way that feels conjured from real memories: a magnet sliding down the icebox door, two women’s legs moving in perfect unison at a shop counter, the sound of Elwood’s grandmother scraping icing off a knife with the ridges of a glass cake stand.
This foundational emotive lens grows increasingly more intricate as the film goes on, eventually becoming an ouroboros of vicarious experience attempting to reconstruct the ghosts of a past that haunts those forced to relive it. The opening invites the audience to embody a young Black boy, the political implications of which Ross proceeds to deliberately subvert.
The first major deviation comes when Elwood first meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and, in a flash, the audience is finally allowed to see through a second pair of eyes, finally witnessing the boy we have hitherto only understood through the tilt of his own retinas. Turner is more cynical than Elwood, having already run away once from Nickel, with no family or future to speak of. The two form a deep friendship, a closeness communicated. A lesser director would use this to ‘cheat’ in more conventional filmmaking.
Ross instead uses their shared positionality to interrogate the boys’ agency as they find themselves routinely anonymised and dehumanised by the world around them.
The second departure comes as Elwood is whipped by the academy’s owner, the camera moving out from first person and training itself on the back of his skull, as if attached to a rig on his back. The world robs him, at this moment, of a perspective. Tellingly, this angle appears again in the non-linear interludes which follow an older Elwood throughout the turn of the millennium, as revelations about the reform school become public knowledge during an investigation.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys is not, strictly speaking, a true story. The film, however, draws heavy inspiration from the Dozier School, where nearly a hundred black boys were murdered up until 1973. The film, like Whitehead’s book, is deeply concerned with what it means, as a Black American artist, to share the stories of those who have suffered under white supremacy, the ways that such a task requires fictionalising and projecting oneself onto strangers and loved ones alike. Ross grapples with the depersonalisation that comes not just from racialised violence, but also the persistent obfuscation of the nation’s history.
Throughout the film, Ross intercuts ephemeral footage from across America’s past. These clips, though they ostensibly break the ‘rules’ of the film, are as much a part of Elwood and Turner’s worldview as any dramatised segment. What is absent from Nickel Boys, on the other hand, is on-screen racialised violence.
Scenes such as the aforementioned whipping instead opt for a kind of gruelling montage of audiovisual cacophony and fractured digitisations of contemporaneous photographs. Ross offers a damning indictment of archival process that document acts of racism – the dearth and manipulation of such images to fit digestible historiographies deny the incomprehensible truth of its own scale.
Were Nickel Boys merely a galvanising accomplishment in post-colonial essay filmmaking, that would be enough. It is doubly wondrous, then, that the film itself is a rivetingly constructed, impressively subtle work of dramaturgy. As a work of literary adaptation, the script’s ingenious deviations and abbreviations do wonders to translate its ideas into theatrical analogues. Often, the audience is forced to orient themselves within a shot in media res, giving the film a surprisingly propulsive rhythm. Herisse and Wilson sell the film; a movie like this could only work with two actors who can convince the lens itself that it’s somebody they know, somebody real, somebody they love. Mostly, it’s just a really good story, performed with consummate pathos and written with staggering grace.
It is easy to make Nickel Boys sound far simpler than it is. That it winds up a profoundly accessible studio film is not proof that its high-minded aesthetic and political ambitions have been neutered. Ross’ avant-garde imagery is so intuitive that it buoys more straightforward elements of the piece without foregoing academic lucidity. Every dramatic manoeuvre and revelation within the plot is echoed and complicated by the surrounding visuals. The resulting effect is neither instructional or redundant; rather, the visuals and the plot entwine as deftly and elegantly as I’ve ever seen in an American studio picture.
Nickel Boys remains a dizzyingly accomplished, dense, and searing diatribe on the dissociation inflicted upon the oppressed by institutional violence, the ways American society dehumanises and anonymises black men as disposable martyrs. It is also, by mere fact of its release, a monumentally inspiring cinematic feat. Despite Amazon MGM clearly aiming for an awards push, Nickel Boys probably won’t win Best Picture; every other frontrunner would be a more fashionable choice. Yet I cannot imagine an English-language film from this decade that will have a greater impact on future generations, on the ways they understand filmic grammar and the possibilities of the medium. Nickel Boys is a masterpiece – moreover, it is a miracle.
ANTICIPATION.
Anything from RaMell Ross is cause for celebration. 5
ENJOYMENT.
There are about a dozen of the best shots I have ever seen in a movie. 5
IN RETROSPECT.
The defining American film of the 2020s. 5
Directed by
RaMell Ross
Starring
Ethan Herisse, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Brandon Wilson
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