‘Nickel Boys’ Is an Experiential Masterpiece—And One of The Year’s Best Films

A salamander crawling on your hand. A jacket from the dry cleaner hanging on the outside of a car door and flapping in the wind. A gulp of whiskey in a bar as the New York City Marathon plays on a muted TV. Your grandmother’s glossy kitchen, as impossibly green as the salamander, flashing through your mind during one of the worst moments in your life.

There are so many moments of breathtaking sadness, beauty and specificity in RaMell Ross’s experiential reimagining of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that they begin to form constellations. By the end, these poetic star maps—space exploration serves as a major motif in the film—guide you through memory, cruelty and history toward a level of truth you can only find in those rare places where art and reality intersect and then transcend each other. 

Ross, who previously directed the 2018 Academy Award-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, pulls off this remarkable cinematic feat by employing extreme subjectivity: the camera is almost entirely kept at the point of view of one of the two lead characters. What could feel like a stunt or gimmick in other hands (the employment of POV camera in the 1947 film noir Lady in the Lake and that film’s critical and financial failure proved disastrous for director-star Robert Montgomery), here comes off as both lyrical and urgent.

We greet this world through the eyes of young Elwood (played by Ethan Cole Sharp as a child, Ethan Herisse as a young man, and Daveed Diggs as an adult), who is called “El” in the movie—as in “love” or “loss.” When he is arrested for a crime he did not commit while traveling to college in Jim Crow Florida, he is sent to the segregated Nickel Academy, a “reform school” that is in practice an institution designed for dehumanization and financial exploitation of its Black inmates. (By contrast, the white kids get to play football with the guards.)

Whitehead famously based the Nickel on the Dozier School for Boys, an institution notorious for its abuse, torture, and murder of students by staff, who here are ably embodied by Hamish Linklater as the lead administrator and Gladiator 2’s Fred Hechinger as an employee who runs the institution’s graft operation. Ross employs elements of documentary—historical and forensic photographs, for example—which ground the story in historical fact while also providing moments of exhalation for those shaken by the first-person visual approach.

Elwood finds the key to his survival in his fast friendship with Turner (Brandon Wilson), a seasoned inmate who is everything he is not: brash, confident, and unwilling to accept defeat. His other lifeline is on the outside—the devoted Nana who raised him and is trying to get him released, portrayed with an indescribable warmth and sorrow by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in what is perhaps the single most moving performance in a film this year.    

As an act of creativity, boldness and empathy, the film is almost unmet by other movies. To find apt comparisons you almost need to look to other forms of art—think Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Stevie Wonder’s ’72 to ’76 run of albums. It is that powerful in terms of form, purpose and creativity. 

That said, it does have a direct connection to Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest. Both films share a fearlessly daring approach to novel adaptation and an outside-the-box use of cinematic language to contend with historical injustice and inhumanity—of which too many of us have become inured, even as current events make the telling of these stories all the more dire. 

Many people may feel, as they did while watching Grazer’s film, overwhelmed, inundated and more than a little put off. “I never want to go through that again,” they say to their companion. 

Yet, as with that film, repeat viewings opens up Nickel Boys, revealing more and deeper revelations and mysteries. It’s a movie that is not only worth returning to again and again, but one you will be grateful to have walking alongside you for years to come.