Nickel Boys Is an Audacious Experiment
“No one believed them until someone else said it.” Readers encounter this sentiment early in The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s award-winning 2019 novel, not long after the unearthing of a bloody bit of history. A secret graveyard has been discovered on the grounds of a decaying former reform school—the Nickel of the book’s title—that had been earmarked for transformation into a corporate office park. Instead, the buyers must contend with this batch of secrets, these bodies buried in unmarked graves—bodies that the survivors of Nickel, much like the real-life survivors of Florida’s Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys (on which Whitehead’s project is based), had long known were there.
History is strange in that way. Memory, its own kind of record, is not enough for some. They need the evidence, the broken skulls and rib cages riddled with buckshot. Nevermind that we’ve been told, already, that the bodies exist, and that the experiences they contain—in Dozier’s case, institutionalized violence, backbreaking labor, sexual abuse, and murder, occurring from the school’s opening in 1900 to its closure in 2011—really happened. The dead, ironically, speak more loudly than the living. Their bodies, incomplete though they are upon rediscovery, are what make the survivors’ stories real.
RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, which adapts Whitehead’s novel, does not restage the book’s opening scene of archaeological discovery; instead, the film opts to leap directly into the stories of the young men who lived at Nickel. His movie shares and enhances the novel’s commitment to excavation—but in place of the plainspoken language of Whitehead’s novel and the ground-penetrating pickaxes of real life, Ross favors images. Images are his pickax.
One of the bedrocks of contemporary cultural representation is the idea of seeing ourselves on-screen. But Ross’s work is after something starker than merely populating the screen with Black bodies and stories. His first feature film, 2018’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, opened with a title card declaring that the movie had grown from a humble photographic project about his day-to-day life in Alabama into a film tracing “how we’ve come to be seen.” The documentary that emerged was free-flowing, eschewing scenes in favor of impressions, working by way of association. The present tense of Black, working-class Alabama was intermingled with images from the archive: movie clips, ephemera, lost snatches of historical life. We saw basketball games, people hanging out in living rooms, glimpses of domesticity with no neat beginnings or endings.
With this in mind, The Nickel Boys seems like an odd project to take on, especially for Ross’s first foray into fiction filmmaking. The weighty subject of Whitehead’s novel seems to demand a straight story—the kind that announces its respect for the material through impressively unvarnished performances, dutiful attention to period trappings, a tasteful approach to the story’s violence. If you’ve heard anything about Ross’s movie, however, you’ve almost certainly heard about the defining gambit of its visual style—which will either pull you in, hold you at a distance, or, perhaps most generatively, a little of both. The film by and large adheres to Whitehead’s story, but unlike the novel, it is told in the first person. This is the single most important quality of its approach. We experience the world of its two main characters, Elwood and Turner, as if we were their characters—not unlike a video game, but without the garishness this may imply.
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Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse) is a 17-year-old standout student living with his grandmother Hattie (a stunning Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in 1960s Tallahassee. He is living the straight path: When Elwood gets in trouble with the police, he is on his way to a nearby Black college to enroll in free classes being offered to promising high schoolers. His mistake is hitching a ride with a man driving a stolen vehicle. When they are pulled over and arrested, Elwood is rendered guilty by association and shipped down to the Nickel Academy, a segregated institution that will strip him of his freedom and render him a cog in the state machine. Elwood experiences some of the usual rigors of prison and reform school: the bullying, the joshing around, the discipline, the abuse. The saving grace is the friend that he makes, a young man from Houston named Turner (Brandon Wilson), who tries his best to show Elwood the ropes and spare him the worst of what Nickel has to offer.
Whitehead has said that Elwood and Turner represent the two parts of him, the idealist (Elwood) and the cynic (Turner), whose intertwined perspectives inform his own view of race as a Black man making sense of contemporary America. Elwood is a product of the belief that Jim Crow demanded Black Americans, in order to survive, live life on the straight and narrow. As performed in Ross’s movie, he is less insistently ideological than the Elwood of the book. But the material undergirding his beliefs—his keen admiration for Martin Luther King Jr., in particular—is still present. The Nickel boys aren’t supposed to be used like slaves, Elwood tries to argue, because it’s against the law. He reacts to unfairness with outrage: “How can they do that?” Turner, meanwhile, has no faith in the law as written. He knows that what matters is what is enforced.
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Almost all of Nickel Boys plays out from Elwood’s and Turner’s direct perspectives, sometimes flitting between the two boys within the same scene. Audiences look as they look, see what they presumably saw. It is hard to refute lives that feel so real. We are peering out through a pair of eyes that soak in details like someone already grasping to remember them—be it the pain Hattie evinces as she recounts a story of her own father’s encounters with the vagaries of injustice, or the double vision of a young man watching a televised speech by King through a shop window, seeing himself mapped onto that ideal of justice and peace. Memories live in the senses.
The movie is sensuous, no doubt, and Nickel Boys belongs to an ongoing trend, in Black independent filmmaking, of pushing sensuousness to the fore—Moonlight being the most obvious example, Beyoncé’s Lemonade being the most visible, and a film like last year’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, which was shot by Nickel Boys’ cinematographer Jomo Fray, being the most similar. The screenshottable, retweetable, oft-imitated hallmarks of this aesthetically rich style have earned suspicion, in some corners—a retread of the usual arguments about style versus substance. And, in fact, conversations I’ve had so far about Nickel Boys have been full of wariness, accordingly, and disagreement over whether its central visual conceit and its confronting beauty really “work.”
The trick of POV filmmaking is that it fools us into thinking we’re seeing everything that the character sees, in the same level of detail and with the same visual focus. But Nickel Boys’ subtle choice is to discard this method on occasion. Some of the film’s scenes are subjective, in the way that the POV sequences are, but artfully detached. A scene of a group of boys being taken from their beds in the night and led to a shack to be beaten is clearly being witnessed through Elwood’s eyes, at first. But the camera zeroes in on other boys’ trembling as they await their turn to be assaulted, and the sequence is interspersed with close-ups on, among other things, a Bible. When Elwood is led into the room, we hover behind him. When the violence starts, Ross immediately turns our gaze elsewhere, toward history.
Over the sounds of Elwood being brutalized, our gaze meets the gazes of nameless men we do not recognize—men from a real, damaged photo of the Dozier school that has been zoomed in so much that the faces themselves are deformed, impossible to identify. The scene is a memory; that much becomes clear when the film snaps to the present, to an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective of an adult Elwood doing the remembering. But in the moment, these various perspectives—Elwood being beaten, the haunting faces from the photograph, the man turning all of this over in his mind—are made distinct, only to be stitched back together as the film proceeds.
Whitehead began writing the book, his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Underground Railroad, after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, when it seemed urgent to him to “make sense of where we were as a country.” Ross’s film seems to insist that this is where we are: inescapably enmeshed in historical violence, yet zeroed in to the point that our own histories are unrecognizable to us.
When Nickel Boys ends, something has changed. I’m wary of revealing the twist, which is the same as in the book, but achieved to different effect by this film. Suffice to say that it returns us to the question that Whitehead’s novel has pushed into view all along. There is history as we tell it, and then there is the material: the evidence, the archive, whatever it is that makes these stories possible to tell. Ross’s film is a sterling attempt to explode that distinction. The history, by the end, is immediately real—not only because we dug up the bodies, but because, in his hands, we’ve lived them.