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The Potent Perspective and Hidden Trauma of Nickel Boys

When adapting a book to the screen, more directors ought to have the courage to experiment like RaMell Ross. When looking at Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, somewhere he conceived an out-of-the-box idea for how to present it; an idea that if executed well, would profoundly immerse the audience in the critical experience of the characters. Too often, movies depicting the struggles of black history can feel distant and inert -mere history lessons on film, the greater points obscured by the medium and the time differential. Ross’s interpretation of The Nickel Boys vividly aims to do just the opposite.
I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie where one artistic choice dictated more single-handedly its effectiveness than Nickel Boys, a film that is shot entirely from alternating first-person point-of-views. Without this stylistic conceit the movie might be fine in a surface-level way -a Hidden Figures kind of way- but it would be totally indistinct and unmemorable, which would be an injustice to its essential message. But through this lens the story becomes real, the audience made to experience a vivid first-hand perspective on the events that unfold at Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school in Florida in the 1960s.
It is based on the Florida School for Boys, an institution in operation outside Marianna until 2011 -just a year before an investigation uncovered dozens of unmarked graves and records of nearly a hundred deaths at the school over the decades -mostly of black teenagers sent there on dubious charges. Whitehead’s story is set in its analogue during the Civil Rights era, following Tallahassee native Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), sent to Nickel Academy after he is charged as an accomplice in the robbery of a car he just happened to accept a ride home in -derailing the promising future of an HBCU scholarship. At Nickel, he befriends  Turner (Brandon Wilson) an orphaned youth from Texas, and they become quite close in spite of their diverging ideologies around the revolutionary moment -Elwood being drawn to the philosophies and activism of Civil Rights, while Turner is more inclined to keep his head down and simply get by.
Nickel Boys is Ross’s first narrative feature -he’s primarily worked as a documentarian and that clearly informs the other touch beyond the POV that he applies to the film: inserts and transitions to the miasma of the world outside the confines of Nickel, shifting behind them as they serve out their indefinite sentence, digging in the significance of the time but juxtaposing this lesser known facet of it alongside. There’s as much transcendence to that imagery as to the unique aspects of the principal style -Ross’s cinematographer Jomo Fray coming right off All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt and his immaculate work there. Indeed that movie’s mood is somewhat reprised here, in spite of its more conventional narrative style, as the camera takes in details of the world that are mere aesthetic, not exclusively plot-relevant. I love the focus early on while Elwood is talking to his guardian nana (a moving Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), on the baking she is doing and her particular mode of it, the sliding of residue off a knife.
The POV shifts between Elwood and Turner through the movie and the first time it does this is remarkable, with the same scene playing out from both their vantage points, ushering in Turner organically as an important character and allowing us to see Elwood for the first time from the outside, gleaning how his interiority is perceived. Ross never lets this technique grow stale, and uses context or otherwise employs it to better diversify  the way the camera sees the world through the eyes of these two youths. There’s a fascinating trick where a portion of a scene plays out in an overhead mirror the two are looking up into while walking. There are a couple scenes we see firsthand that are then replicated from another viewpoint in a photograph. Moreover, Ross incorporates some rich details of how we literally see the world, during a boxing fight focusing closer on a handful of figures as our mind’s eye is wont to do, and especially the use of shifts to darkness, indicative of the character closing their eyes, makes a couple scenes of impending trauma more vivid than if it were shown outright.  The camera is almost always moving as the characters’ attention is drawn. And the effect is that the mental head-space of either Elwood or Turner is rendered more clearly, their personality illustrated in subtle ways.
The style does not inhibit the performances however, and both Herisse and Wilson play well their parts -their voices are required to carry a little more than usual and but for a couple moments where reflections are viewed they aren’t permitted to share the screen together. And yet still they have good chemistry, and believably convey a sense of firm friendship. A part of this however is down to the format's ability to effectively immerse the audience in the character's point-of-view and subliminally their feelings. It genuinely makes you feel a stronger connection to the characters looking directly at camera. And the circumstances of the story bolster it.
Much of the horror endured at Nickel happens outside the immediate perspectives of these boys but the implications ring out, the dangerous atmosphere hangs low. Ross makes some conscious choices, like refusing to adopt Elwood's perspective during a period where he is confined to a sweat-box, because the impact it has on Turner is more important. He does let us into Elwood's space when his grandmother visits and shares the devastating news that the lawyer she hired to appeal his case ran off with her money, and we experience his mood of restrained hopelessness. The emotional toll of the place and the situation for these boys is emphatic, the world of the 60s they live within crashing in just as things feel most tangible, divorced from another period in history.
There is one corner of the film, sequestered in between the experiences at Nickel, that flashes forward some twenty and then some fifty years later, and which curiously moves outside the first-person perspective to a hovering viewpoint fixed just over the shoulder of an older Elwood -played by Daveed Diggs, though we don't see his face. It is a little haunting, this stylistic choice, to say nothing of the subject matter which insinuates the trauma he still lives with from his days at Nickel. There are details abounding here, and particularly around Elwood that are somewhat suspicious, and are ultimately answered in the most turbulent of ways. A jolt of both a visual device and a narrative twist that casts a new perspective and once more articulates the story's starkness.
The spotlight that Nickel Boys shines on an oft overlooked corner in the history of racial violence in America is significant, but it's Ross's choice in presentation, and all the captivating filmmaking and distinct storytelling that comes out of it that makes this film so much more effective and resonant than it would have been were a more typical structure applied. It also singles out Ross as a filmmaker with a strong sense of creative vision -not that he would necessarily repeat this technique, but how he would choose to approach another story is fascinating. Nickel Boys stands out, just as its analogues should.
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