Racist cruelty in a 1960s institution but mercifully transcendent through abstraction
RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel about racial injustice and worse at a detention school for boys in 1962 Florida (the tail end of Jim Crow and eve of the civil rights movement) stuns in its dreamy, hypnotic use of POV shifts, abstraction of violence and subtle yet powerful commentary on the inhumane ills we do to each other. The effect of “Nickel Boys” is intentionally unsettling as we embed with Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two Black boys at the Nickel Academy, where kids are divided into white and nonwhite under the ever-present eyes of glowering guards, not far off from the “boss man” in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). As you can guess, the former get better food, longer recesses and lighter labor. They also don’t run the risk of “disappearing”; the real-life school Whitehead modeled his novel on, the Dozier School for Boys, was shut down in 2011 after an investigation by the Department of Justice found 55 unmarked graves. The causes of death were varied: fire, malnutrition, disease and blunt trauma, all grim, if not criminal.
Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes choose to go at Whitehead’s straight-ahead arc in fragments and wispy Terrence Malick-esque glimmers. It is as mesmerizing as it is terrorizing. Much of the early part of the film is told from Elwood’s point of view – we don’t see Elwood, just see and experience what he does, from being harassed and assigned extra work by overseers to becoming friends with Turner. When we jump into Turner’s view, we finally see Elwood: lanky, languid and demurely charming. The film slips into omniscient POV at times too, not entirely consistently, but it’s in the boys’ blinders, with each reining in emotions to survive, that the film’s at its most evocative and immersive high.
The backstory for the tour of horrors at Nickel (the beatings and abuse tend to take place just off frame, the way atrocities at Auschwitz were layered in obliquely in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” last year) is that Elwood was imprisoned wrongly; he was an early enrollee in college and, on his first day of school, innocently caught a ride with a car thief and was held as an accomplice when stopped. In the flash of a badge, his life goes from promising future to dire straits. Fortunately he has a caring nana fighting for him (the always excellent Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, going a long way here as the woman who raises Elwood after his parents abandoned him when he was 6), which is more than most (and why those 55 graves went unquestioned for so long). Her efforts to raise him are stymied regularly by bureaucracy, systemic racism and shithead shysters and wind up making Elwood a target inside.
The pit of despair is deep and wide, but hope never dims.
In texture and tenor, the reimagining of Whitehead’s text by Ross (a documentary filmmaker making an impressive feature debut) and Barnes is a radical departure while hewing to its narrative structure and barbed social agenda. It’s a jumping-off that adroitly leverages the language of cinema (the camerawork by Jomo Fray is ethereal and transportive) to evoke on a deep level. It wouldn’t work without Herisse and Wilson’s transformative turns and fluid onscreen chemistry, as well as the surrounding cast of boys and jailers. “Nickel Boys” is a subtle yet haunting condemnation of racism in America and one that doesn’t feel as far off as the measure of years in between tell us.
For What it's Worth 