Nickel Boys
Documentary filmmaker RaMell Ross (best known for Hale County This Morning, This Evening) moves into fiction filmmaking with this heartbreaking story of two boys' experience of racism and brutality at a reform school in 1960s Florida
Director RaMell Ross’s move into narrative fiction is supremely confident in tone, style, narration and adaptational choices, expanding and reshaping Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel while losing none of the source’s poetry and grief. His choice to shoot the story of two boys – Elwood Curtis (Herisse) and Turner (Wilson) – who end up at Nickel Academy, a brutal segregated reform school in 1960s Florida, almost exclusively from their own first-person perspectives highlights and expands the work’s themes of (de)humanisation, (dis)embodiment, and bearing witness to personal and systemic traumas.
The camera lingers on quotidian details: sun and leaves, dusty hallways, translucent reflections in glass. But instead of naturalism, this approach is tied to a surreal collage. Shot using a 4:3 aspect ratio, the film boldly cuts between the boys’ past, present, and future; quasi-dream sequences; and the world beyond Nickel (often via historical archival footage). The result is a haunting tribute to the not-so-distant past and lives crushed by US institutionalised racism. The score by Alex Somers and Scott Alario mainly consists of brass and percussion, but it's the unnerving silences between uneven rhythms that refuse to leave the mind, creating a feeling of heightened terror and – occasionally – moments of sublime escape.
Herisse and Wilson (and actors playing younger and older counterparts) capture the thousand mundane dreams that Nickel cannot ruin. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s magnificent turn as Elwood’s proud, kind grandmother Hattie provides the film’s emotional centre. A film of extraordinary clarity and craftsmanship, Nickel Boys will break and remake hearts.