Nickel Boys overflows with formal ingenuity and daring.
In adapting Colson Whitehead’s fact-based novel about two teenagers in 1960s Florida who meet at a horrifically abusive reform school, director RaMell Ross makes an extreme tactical choice: to have the camera almost exclusively represent the first-person points of view of the main characters. And so, for the vast majority of the film, we only see the world through the eyes of the studious, somewhat naive Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and the sly, cynical Turner (Brandon Wilson).
The technique makes sense, given how much the notion of perspective is explored and subverted in the novel—as well as the fact that Ross’ exquisite 2018 debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was a documentary about looking at familiar things from a unique vantage point. Nickel Boys is an extreme extension of that sensibility, albeit within a more conventional narrative form.
At first, Ross’ decision is thrilling. We initially meet Elwood as a younger boy living with his grandmother in Tallahassee. The film opens with the image of an orange hanging from a branch, as seen from below. This is Elwood lying on the ground, looking up; when the camera turns to the side, we can see his outstretched arm in the grass, a leaf grasped in his hand. From there, Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray introduce us to Elwood’s life with little snippets of his point of view: his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) dropping tinsel on his head as he lies under a Christmas tree; his teacher giving him a slight, approving nod in class; and—in a shot that took my breath away—his own reflection (as played by Ethan Cole Sharp at this stage in a gleaming iron as it passes along an ironing board and across the screen.
There was a point, some 15 minutes in, when I wondered: is this going to be the whole movie? And my heart leapt when I realized that the answer was yes. This was a bravura experiment—an attempt to move beyond conventional cinematic empathy, where we’re given an intimate window into someone else’s life. This is closer to incarnation—empathy in bodily form.
Other movies have tried something similar. As recently as 2023, Fray was also the cinematographer on Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, which consisted of a kaleidoscope of one woman’s intimately imaged memories of growing up in rural Mississippi. In Son of Saul, from 2015, director László Nemes depicted a Jewish prisoner’s experience at Auschwitz-Birkenau by only offering a close medium shot of the main character, obscuring nearly everything but his face.
Neither of those movies came off as gimmicks; neither does Nickel Boys. Ross and Fray bring artists’ eyes to the conceit, while thematic justification for the choice abounds. Seen and experienced from this vantage point, the institutional and systemic injustice registers on a personal—rather than simply a theoretical—level. Then there is the issue of race. Considering that both boys are Black, white audiences in particular are put on the receiving end of the sort of racism they could only otherwise imagine—as when a white passenger turns around to stare, with seething contempt, at Elwood as he sits in the back of a city bus. We feel the hatred more intimately here than we would in a traditionally shot film.
The point-of-view perspective isn’t the only challenging formal element Ross includes, however. I won’t go into too much detail for fear of spoilers, but about halfway through, Nickel Boys diverts from the technique to offer an awkward angle from behind and above the shoulders of certain characters—clearly by having the actors wear a harness of some kind. It’s jarring and took me out of the movie in a way the POV shots did not. Meanwhile, the insert shots of found footage and documentary material that had been sparsely included become more frequent and tangentially related. Archival material related to the real-life reform school on which Nickel is based (also referenced in Whitehead’s book) provide harrowing context, but cutaways to moon missions and surfing Santas are less additive. Then there are flashes of fantasy—including a black-and-white-shot of a horse standing in a Nickel hallway—that diffuse the visual strategy even further.
It’s all too much of a good thing: the urge to burst open a difficult genre—the historical drama chronicling Black trauma—with newfound invention and immediacy. Perhaps it’s unfair to hold such ambition against the movie. And anyway, why complain that something isn’t perfect when there are instances of perfection throughout? Aside from Elwood’s reflection in the iron, there are other shots in Nickel Boys that astonish in their observational precision, concision, and acuity: Elwood watching the brochure for the college he hopes to attend slowly slide down the refrigerator door, the weak magnet evoking the fragility of his dream; the legs of two shoppers in the dime store where he works turning in unison, as if they were performing a dance routine; an ant skittering across a rusty shackle embedded in a tree trunk on the Nickel property, oblivious to the horrors—past, present, and future—upon which it crawls.
In such moments, Nickel Boys captures the world—with all its terror and beauty—in an instant, unlike few other films I can recall.
(1/16/2025)
