REVIEW: "Nickel Boys" (2024)

WRITER'S NOTE: The following was originally posted on my Facebook page on January 24, 2025. 

Perspective is one of the most powerful and immersive tools in an artist’s arsenal, particularly from a first-person narrative. Authors write about it. Stage actors portray it. Music composers experiment with and construct it. And filmmakers present it in ways that the former two can’t. However, the presentation can still be novelistic, lyrical, and captivating. Such is the case with director/co-writer Ramell Ross’s screen adaptation of Colton Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction novel, Nickel Boys. 

Centered primarily on two young African-American men in a controversial reform school in the 1960s South, Ross shoots exclusively—and in a 1.33:1 Academy aspect ratio, no less—from the first-person viewpoints of his two leads throughout. The result is a very subjective and intimate means of storytelling in cinema, redefining what an “engaging” experience can be. 

Directors like the late Jonathan Demme and Cameron Crowe were known for including fourth wall closeups of their respective actors, as if we (the audience) were characters in those films; in this case, we are the main characters, Elwood and Turner (played splendidly by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, respectively). Taking inspiration from fellow visual storyteller Terrence Malick, Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray find meaning and poetry in extreme close-ups (representing childhood memories and fragments), as well as classrooms, city streets, bicycles, lizards, and time lapses inside a moving boxcar. I wondered how they shot scenes involving reflections in mirrors and windows. Very impressive. Other moments feature two versions of the same character (young and old) in the same scene, while the poster image of Elwood and Turner looking up at a ceiling mirror is striking. 

The main question is, why these two characters? And why does the camera exclusively switch between their perspectives? Quite simply, Elwood (a promising college student) represents one view from outside the school, sent to the facility after a wrongful misunderstanding—and "a classic miscarriage of justice”—while Turner represents one view from inside. Their presence and arcs highlight opposing and/or common themes of hope versus doubt, reality versus pretending, standing up for what’s right versus submitting/hiding in fear, and the notion of “writing off” one’s debt to society, as well as conflicting definitions of “freedom” and “ways out” (around or through). Again, Nickel Boys is a story about perspective, with two characters as key eyewitnesses to the “sinister” underbelly of the eponymous place. 

The real Nickel Academy had a long history of cruelty and brutality against its students; it closed in 2011. (The film periodically cuts to a present-day Elwood—the camera mounted/tracking from his back—researching and investigating answers to the dark history of the school, including deaths and unmarked graves, and PTSD and pain still intact.) And while we don’t witness any actual violence, we do get a lot of implications of what happens behind closed doors, including buildings and rooms that are described as hellish. It’s even suggested that outside visitors aren’t welcomed, including Elwood’s empathetic and compassionate grandmother (played by a superb Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). 

With an intense and encompassing score by Scott Alario and Alex Somers, parallel clips from the 1950 Sidney Poitier-Tony Curtis drama The Defiant Ones (represented in Elwood and Turner), excerpts from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and archival footage of the Apollo 8 space mission of the 1960s (possibly signifying hope for the future), the film is also a story of young men whose lives were taken from them, cut off from the rest of the world, and the courage of those who stood up and exposed the truth. The two perspectives of Nickel Boys represent hope and determination against a haunting, overwhelming, and heartbreaking history. It’s one of 2024’s standout films. 

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