Nickel Boys
AMAZON
In this insecure era of handholding cinema, a movie like Nickel Boys may seem like a significant ask for viewers who feel reassured when its cineast takes zero risks and points them in a specific direction. That’s why such a proposition by director RaMell Ross feels “bold” and “new” in a day and age where few filmmakers actively experiment with form and trust their audience’s intelligence to ponder what its images represent. Told entirely through the first-person perspective of its protagonists, Nickel Boys initially acclimates audiences to this aesthetic through the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a Black child who is raised in Tallahassee by his grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in the Jim Crow era.
Of course, a first-person POV visualization isn’t at all groundbreaking. In recent examples, Gaspar Noé and Ilya Naishuller have attempted to break the traditional conventions of third-person cinema with Enter the Void and the less radical and more crowd-pleasing Hardcore Henry. Even with the latter following a linear, “three-act” structured story, both movies still attempt to push the limits of what can be achieved when focusing on their specific protagonist, whether in a more spiritual (drug-heavy) approach or in redefining the language of action movie kinetics. How does movement differ during a fight scene when the film is shot in its entirety with GoPros? And for Noé, by always filming through the interior viewpoint of his protagonist, what does he want the audience to feel when he partakes in copious amounts of drugs?
However, Ross’s approach to Nickel Boys feels different. As mentioned above, he first puts us into the eyes of Elwood, who grew up in a politically-charged era, where Martin Luther King Jr. promised that change was coming and segregation would soon end. In this section, we barely see what Elwood looks like, apart from a reflexive shot of him looking out of a TV display window and listening to Dr. King while his grandmother discusses with her friends. Elwood eventually grows up and is sent to college after his teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), encourages him to pursue his dreams and think for himself.
In this section, things seem to be looking good for him. Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray vividly represent these moments in Elwood’s life. They make the audience experience the same feelings that we all felt as teenagers. From Hattie's comforting, safe hugs to the glances he gives to young girls he has a crush on, these moments of love, discovery, and anxiety are shot with a great, almost overwhelming sense of intimacy. And it doesn’t take long for us to be enraptured by how Ross shoots this adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s book, which wasn’t even told in the first-person.
But in repurposing the narrative through the eyes of its Black protagonists, Ross posits the audience as witnesses to their story, which grows significantly darker when Elwood, on his way to college, hitches a ride from a stranger. He does not know that this person is on the police’s radar and is driving a stolen car, leading the officers to arrest Elwood and charge him as his accomplice. Too young to go to prison, he is sent to Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school where the white students have more privileges than the Black children.
Its administrator, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), tells the students they can walk free if they attain the “Ace” status. However, they soon learn this is a lie because they cannot leave the establishment until they turn 18. Even then, Spencer and the Academy’s employees make it very hard for the students to reach “Ace.” In contrast, the white children live comfortably, are educated, and don’t eat insufficiently nourishing food. The audience never sees the comparison between the two races, but this is inferred through the quick glimpses Elwood’s point-of-view gives to the children playing football while the Black students must work the fields or deliver supplies with Mr. Harper (Fred Hechinger).
In the scene where Elwood eats oatmeal at the cafeteria, he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson). The two quickly bond and become friends. The cafeteria scene also allows Ross to daringly switch the point of view. The exchange between Elwood and Turner is repeated but from a different internal perspective. For the past forty minutes, Ross meticulously structures the film through the eyes of Elwood, ensuring none of us will ever truly ‘see’ him apart from reflections and will always perceive his narrative through his subjective viewpoint. But in simply alternating the point of view, we get a distinct perception of Elwood, one that grows more complex as the film continues to switch between Elwood, Turner, and eventually flash-forwarding to an older version of Elwood (played here by Daveed Diggs). In that regard, Ross creates a wholly new language within first-person filmmaking, whose visual poetry speaks louder than words.
It gets even more audacious when Ross communicates the narrative between Elwood and Turner inside the school with Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, a film starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. Astute viewers who have seen Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World know that this Godardian technique contrasts an “idealized” representation of a specific point in time with cinema and the harsh reality of the alienating present. Jude contrasted Angela’s (Ilinca Manolache) exhausting day at work with Lucian Bratu’s Angela merge mai departe, which showcased how Romania was represented during Ceaușescu’s totalitarian reign, compared to how the current-day protagonist is filmed in a post-Communist era.
In Nickel Boys, Ross uses Kramer’s film as a way to break free of the ‘trauma porn’ shackles that have perpetuated in Hollywood’s representation of segregation (most recently, in the horrendous The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, which also starred Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and contrast it with the dehumanizing reality both Elwood and Turner live in. He doesn’t constantly refer to The Defiant Ones as much as Jude shapes Do Not Expect around Lucian Bratu’s movie, even getting some of the original actors to reprise their roles as the characters they inhabited in Angela. However, its sparse use in some of Nickel Boys’ most urgent – and emotionally impactful – moments transforms this exercise in past/present-day filmmaking into an act of true clarity.
When Ross ultimately pulls back and cuts to 2018, where Elwood investigates the discovery of unnamed bodies belonging to past students of Nickel Academy, one has a sense of where this film is going. But nothing can prepare anyone for its almost ten-minute-long ending montage, where Elwood’s story is re-told from a new point-of-view, bringing archival footage to what was first an intimate tale of friendship inside one of the most abusive and degrading environments in America. Our connection to Nickel Boys’ characters doesn’t feel distant and is instead so close that one begins to touch the ground they are walking in, taste the food they are subjected to, and experience fleeting moments of joy and freedom in a place they fully know will never give them any.
This visual/aural experience (where the music turns into harsh, almost perverse, white noise, and vice-versa) makes Nickel Boys such a singular, if not extraordinarily significant, piece of work. Of course, none of it would have worked if Herisse and Wilson’s turns as Elwood and Turner weren’t so deeply human as they are and perfectly in tune with Ross’ style. They are the beating hearts of Nickel Boys and give us just enough compassion within their hopeful performances that it becomes easy to be enveloped in their friendship, just as it gets devastating when Hattie, in desperate need of giving love to her grandson, is forbidden to do so, and hugs Turner instead. In those small moments of adoration, Ellis-Taylor’s Oscar-worthy portrayal of Hattie gives her the flowers that she has (rightfully) been given, even with only 21 minutes of screentime.
When Nickel Boys ultimately reaches its shattering conclusion, it’s hard not to walk out of the cinema immediately while the credits are rolling, which is a usual custom that many moviegoers do – but shouldn’t. One feels they must sit for a bit with what they have just seen, but it may take a long way to truly unpack what this first-person(s) journey all meant. It’s a film that needs your attention and warrants multiple rewatches that will only reward the viewer who knows how Ross operates his story and how it communicates with numerous points-of-view, art, politics, and even Hays Code-mandated cinema.
Nickel Boys alienates the minute it switches perspectives and never gives easy answers. That may be a put-off for some looking for more conventional, handholding cinema. However, in adapting Whitehead’s book in the third person, as it was written, Ross’ cinematic adaptation would’ve likely lost the emotional potency and searing intimacy it captures through its naturalistic and affecting photography. In shifting Whitehead’s writing to multiple first-person viewpoints, Ross turns a previously ambitious, unfilmable book into an essential work of art that will stand the test of time as one of the decade’s most outstanding moviegoing achievements.