Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s outstanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, is a daring experiment that tells the stories of its two protagonists in first-person perspective, giving the viewer the unsettling feeling of being in the abuse-ridden Nickel “Academy” for Boys. It’s easily one of the best films of 2024, earning just two Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay), although the script’s fidelity to the novel ended up blunting some of the suspense of the film for me. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on that MGM+ thing nobody has.)
Nickel Boys starts by following Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a bookish young Black man in Florida in 1962 who ends up arrested as an accomplice to a theft he didn’t commit and is sent to a segregated reform school, based on the real-life Florida School for Boys, which was only closed in 2009 after decades of reports of abuse, rape, and murder of the children imprisoned there. Elwood becomes an easy target for some of the bigger, tougher boys there until a longer-term inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson), comes to his aid, and the two become friends. When the pair see all of the corruption and violence going on behind the scenes, they hatch a plot to try to get the abusive school leader removed from power. Scenes from 1988 are interspersed through the film, showing Elwood, now an adult living in New York City, running his own moving business, eventually running into a former classmate from the institution and hearing how many others have died or fallen into substance abuse since they were “graduated.” We also see Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in the beginning of the movie before Elwood’s arrest, in her attempts to visit him and use a lawyer to get him released, and in some of Elwood’s flashbacks to his life before Nickel.
This is the first full-length feature from director and co-screenwriter RaMell Ross, who directed the Oscar-nominated short Hale County This Morning, This Evening in 2018, making it even more impressive that he chose to film it in first-person perspective, and to do so from the viewpoint of two different characters. There are several scenes we see twice, which naturally changes the way we interpret the events we’re watching, and even in scenes we see once the shift in perspective can be disorienting – deliberately so, mimicking the sense that the student-inmates must have had in an environment where punishment, including getting “disappeared,” could be arbitrary and capricious. The intense focus on only what Elwood or Turner could see means that the audience’s understanding of how brutal and corrupt the school leadership was is entirely defined by the boys’ understanding of the same. We might suspect it more than they do, of course, but the evidence comes to us through their eyes, so that their disbelief – especially that people in positions of authority could so blatantly ignore the rules and act unfairly – is more palpable.
That this film missed out on the Best Cinematography category is the great snub and mystery of this year’s Oscars; I understand the movie wasn’t that widely seen, but it got a Best Picture nomination, so enough people saw and appreciated it for it to land one of those spots even over some films that (I think) were seen as more likely to make the cut. The cinematography in this movie is everything; it is the defining feature of the film, and it elevates a story that was already fantastic to another level, making this one of the very best movies of the year. The two leads give excellent performances, but I can see the argument that both are too understated to become awards fodder, not when they were competing against impersonations and dancing lawyers and the like.
Nickel Boys is ultimately an experience, or a movie to be experienced, something that I seldom saw in this movie cycle; Anora, which won Best Picture and a slew of other honors, is one of the others, and I’d say the underrated A Real Pain is as well. All three movies draw you into their stories in the early moments and never break the spell until the final scene or two. I was at a slight disadvantage here, because I read the novel and remembered the twist, so the gut-punch moment that comes late in the film didn’t land the same way with me. That’s not a criticism of the film, but a comment on the particular experience I had in watching it. However, Ross made an editorial choice at the very end, after the resolution of the main narrative, showing some real-life images and footage that, unfortunately, did break the spell for me before we hit the credits. It was the only misstep for me in what was otherwise a superb film and tremendous directorial debut, one that I hope is a harbinger of more great work to come.