‘Nickel Boys’ Review: RaMell Ross’ Remarkable Colson Whitehead Adaptation Takes Risks That Pay Off

RaMell Ross’ arresting narrative debut Nickel Boys does not, like the Colson Whitehead novel on which it’s based, begin with an exhumation. It opens, instead, with signs of life: oranges dangling from the branches of a tree; a hand caressing the grass, a beckoning voice calling “Elwood, Elwood, Elwood” like a song. 

Details like these matter in Nickel Boys, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival before it opens New York Film Festival next month, because they mark the passage of time and honor family rituals. Inside the house: glimpses of a gold bracelet wrapped around a delicate wrist, the sound of cards being shuffled and honeyed laughs bouncing off the walls. These details shape memories, eventually ossifying into evidence of an existence. 

In his Oscar-nominated directorial debut Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, Ross constructed a stunning and unforgettable portrait of Hale County, Alabama. He sculpted a roughly 80-minute documentary from over 1,300 hours of footage, shot over five years, by focusing on details — how a grandma coos to soothe an irritable baby, the color of a cheer squad’s uniform — that captured the grooves of daily life for Black residents in this area steeped, like many Southern American locales, in racist history. A loose narrative primarily involved Daniel and Quincy, two high-school basketball players Ross met while working as a teacher and a coach. One of them makes it to college, while the other finds himself rootbound by the responsibilities of a growing family. 

Hale County This Morning, This Evening also reflected Ross’s aesthetic ambitions, how the artist comes to understand and represent the texture of a landscape. He connects the past — Hale County is where the photographer Walker Evans documented the lives of three sharecropping families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and where Martin Luther King Jr. sought refuge in a safe house from the Ku Klux Klan — to the present to the past again. The exercise suggested Ross’s intentions to stretch the bounds of genre until he found the borders of Black representation and, in his words, “the orbit of our dreaming.”

With Nickel Boys, Ross extends his vision into the narrative space. He makes Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a dexterous and moving account of two boys in a punishing Florida reform school, into his own. Here, the artist returns to and expands on some familiar themes: Black boyhood and masculinity, the anchoring force of community and, of course, the landscape and its secrets. 

Nickel Boys begins with Elwood Curtis, a young Black boy played at first by Ethan Cole Sharp, living in Tallahassee with his grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), during the height of Jim Crow. He goes to a school where textbooks, once owned by white students, are blemished with racist caricatures and epithets.

But Elwood finds solace in the words of Dr. King. Whispers about strikes and boycotts have hit his corner of the South, and Elwood wants to join the good fight. His high school teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), a convivial tutor and former organizer, thinks Elwood has a real future. He encourages the quiet boy, who mostly keeps to himself, to enroll in college courses. Elwood jumps at the opportunity, but fate can be a cruel arbiter. 

A lawyer Hattie hires later calls the situation a classic miscarriage of justice. Elwood (now played by When They See Us actor Ethan Herisse) hitches a ride with a slick, well-dressed Black man who cops accuse of stealing a car. The officer considers the baby-faced kid an accomplice and sends him to reform school. We experience all of this action in concise bursts of imagery through cinematographer Jomo Fray’s intimate subjective point of view. An orange tree coming into focus becomes a flash of television screens; becomes the brochure for the technical college sliding down the refrigerator, too heavy for even a magnet; becomes the back of a police car; becomes the pristine lawns of Nickel Boy Academy. As Elwood rolls up into his new home, a menacing and harsh tune from Scott Alario and Alex Somers’ score warns of trouble ahead. 

The danger is vulgar but, like Whitehead, Ross doesn’t sensationalize. Nickel Boys treats the horrific experiences of its incarcerated young men with a matter-of-factness that doesn’t contradict care. The beatings at the ominously named shack called the White House, the harsh field labor (the orange trees transformed into a threat) and the abuse from the staff are all captured with a melancholic sobriety. They are presented in the same kind of spurts as Elwood’s biography; editor Nicholas Monsour connects them, finding a staccato rhythm in the transitions.

Between scenes, Ross reminds us of the past: Grainy interstitial footage, culled by archival producer Allison Brandin, sutures the experiences of Elwood and the Nickel Boys to a broader American history. Whitehead’s novel was inspired by the real life Dozier School for Boys, whose scarred alumni came forward a decade ago to tell their stories. 

In a flash-forward to a more contemporary time, Elwood sits hunched at a computer looking at images of exhumed graves discovered near Nickel. There’s a sense that justice might be served in these scenes, but it’s weighted by the trauma of the details. Nickel Boys moves between the real past, as seen through archival footage, and the fictional past and present of the story. (In this present, the weakest of the three threads, Elwood is played by Daveed Diggs.) Ross, with Fray, creates his own grammar for understanding. Close-ups define the visual aesthetic. The structure of Nickel Boys echoes Raven Jackson’s approach in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, for which Fray also served as DP. 

At Nickel, Elwood meets Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), whose cynicism at the system and devil-may-care attitude clash with Elwood’s Dr. King-shaped moral code. The two ease into a friendship, fortified by their off-campus work assignments with Harper (Thelma’s Fred Hechinger), the kind of white guy who thinks he’s good. While essentially being loaned out for odd jobs, Elwood and Turner exchange origin stories and debate their worldviews.

Ross, honoring the perspective shift that characterizes Whitehead’s novel, switches between Elwood and Turner’s points of view, remaining, at all times, in the subjective mode. The commitment to this way of storytelling imbues Nickel Boy with an overwhelming intimacy and becomes another way that Ross, as a filmmaker, stretches what it means to represent Black people. How easy it might have been to maintain an objective, neutral distance as we watch Elwood and Turner. Instead, Ross takes a risk and it pays off. 

Elwood and Turner’s friendship is the focal point around which all other events revolve. Herisse and Wilson offer striking performances that deepen understanding of this bond and clarify the trauma of this experience. Their faces — stone-cold even when talking about happier memories — reveal the weariness of navigating a system bent on foreclosing your options. Ellis-Taylor doesn’t play as big a role but, characteristically, delivers when she is onscreen. Hattie, a matriarch, is in her own way bludgeoned by the system. 

Comparisons to Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ own exploration of Black boyhood and masculinity, might be inevitable, especially as Nickel Boys gains a wider audience, but Ross is eking out his own cinematic territory. The difference is all in the details.