‘Nickel Boys’ May Be the Most Radical Literary Adaptation Ever Made
That movies are capable of being machines of empathy, as Roger Ebert once said, is taken as a given — it’s just a matter of how that empathy is generated. You might have heard that Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, takes a bold and highly unusual approach to translating its source material to the screen. Before the first of our two tour guides takes us through the Jim Crow South circa the early 1960s — and into the Nickel Academy, a reformatory-slash-racist hellhole based on the notorious Dozier School in Florida, that will earn them the nickname in the title — we get a child-eye’s view of the world. The very first image is a summer sky, seen in 1:33 academy ratio and as if you were lying on your back in a field on a lazy afternoon; a second or two later, the camera gives you a sideways view of the grass, as if you’d just gently rolled onto your side.
From there, a series of scenes — a late-night house party full of adults drinking and carousing, a cascade of tinsel falling off a Christmas tree, a playground fail — replicate a you-are-there feeling as a preadolescent named Elwood Curtis navigates the agonies and ecstasies of boyhood. Or maybe a you-are-Elwood feeling is more accurate. Folks who’ve seen Ross’ 2018 debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening will recognize the free-form lyricism of these sequences, which play out like long-lost memories. Soon, Elwood’s reflection appears in his grandmother’s iron and in the window of an appliance store, where a half-dozen TVs are broadcasting Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at Selma. We see more of this young man as he begins to see more of himself, and his place in the world. Then you realize: This is an extended first-person perspective. And we’re going to do more than just walk a mile in Elwood’s shoes over the next two-and-a-half hours. We’re going to intimately and uncomfortably experience everything along with him.
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It’s a bold gamble, sticking to a fixed first-person POV more associated with gimmicky, swing-and-a-miss genre experiments and video games, even if this wasn’t a prestige drama based on a Pulitzer-winning novel, and dealing with a gut-wrenching historical tragedy. But Ross’ formalist roll of the dice pays off in a huge way, and it’s this choice — along with the insistence from all involved that the story’s abundance of humanism isn’t sacrificed one iota in the pursuit of aestheticism — that makes Nickel Boys not just unique but undeniable. There is simply nothing else like it.
As Elwood (Ethan Herisse) enters young adulthood, we begin to clock both his potential — a kindly teacher (The Last Black Man in San Francisco‘s Jimmie Fails) recommends him for an exclusive academic program at a local college — and the subtle and not-so-subtle inequity that permeates the separate-but-not-equal Sunshine State he inhabits. A joyous moment in a photo booth with Elwood’s sweetheart cuts abruptly to a shirtless Black torso being aggressively prodded by a white man’s cane. Again, this is seen through your/his eyes, and is presented without context or probable cause; there’s the sense that this is just one everyday violation among many. When Elwood walks to the local university on what have been his first day in class, he accepts a ride from a charitable stranger. The vehicle turns out to have been stolen. The law does not care that the teen is innocent, or even acknowledge the protestations of his loving grandmother Hattie (Origin‘s Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, stunning). His life is interrupted regardless.
Nickel Boys sticks to Elwood’s viewpoint, communicating the fear, the confusion, the anxiety, and the lack of free will in an experiential way that drives home what it’s like to have freedom violently taken from you. Then, one day at lunch, a new student begins talking to Elwood. After he defends him (us) against some rowdy bullies at their table, he introduces himself: Turner (Brandon Wilson) from Houston. A montage of time-lapse photography capturing train rides and open fields unfolds, and then the lunchroom scene replays — from Turner’s perspective. We witness Elwood’s reticence to engage, his wariness at this unsolicited act of kindness, the way that gratitude slowly, reluctantly bubbles up to the surface and reveals itself behind his eyes. The movie has established a second POV, which we’ll now mostly toggle between for the rest of the running time. And their growing bond becomes ours as well.
Whitehead has spoken about how, when he was writing his justly acclaimed book, Elwood and Turner represented the warring voices in his head. Elwood is an optimist, a true believer that a change is gonna come and that the arc of history does indeed bend toward justice. Turner is one part pessimist and two parts pragmatist, fully knowing that there are only a few ways out of Nickel and that Civil Rights marches or not, the golden rule is “you can change the laws if you convince enough white people.” Ross maintains this dichotomy, although to his everlasting credit, he never presents any of it dogmatically or weighed down by easy applause-break stumping. These characters play out their fates by how they deal with the good, bad, and extremely ugly that comes their way, courtesy of two actors who prove they’re major talents. Herisse was in When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s drama about the Exonerated Five; Harris had a key part in the Ben Affleck sports movie The Way Back. Both of them work in tandem here in way that neither panders nor soft-pedals the horror of their incarceration. They’re the ones who ensure that the movie’s heady experimentation is still a story about human beings trying to survive.
Ross has a few other ways of disrupting the proceedings, including flash-forwards involving Daveed Diggs in the 1980s, looking into possible investigations and excavations of bodies on the academy grounds (he places the camera behind Diggs’ head, which gives us a slightly third-person perspective à la the Dardenne brothers), and the use of archival footage ranging from the opening credits of The Defiant Ones to a newsreel touting the debunked pseudoscience of phrenology. If the strict viewpoints on the school’s grounds deepen your understanding via limitations, these vignettes expand things to remind you that Nickel does not exist in a vacuum, nor does the past ever stay solely in the past. In the case of the blurred, black-and-white pictures of young men’s faces, each twisted in pain, that sub in for a beating in the torture chamber euphemistically dubbed “the White House,” the snippets make their mark far more resonantly than simple re-creations.
The sheer accumulation of details — the way Ellis-Taylor’s character winks at her grandson as she cleans a restaurant’s floors, a rendering of a lynching drawn in the corners of a textbook, how Hamish Linklater’s school warden removes his wedding ring before nearly whipping someone to death — that Ross threads into Nickel Boys complement the way he presents them, personalizing them in a way that closes the gap between observer and participant. To say that the combination of all of these elements leads up to a final act and a fill-in-the-blanks coda that devastates you all the more for its unusual attack on your emotional reserves does not do justice to the actual act of seeing it. Do not plan on doing anything for the rest of the day after you’ve witnessed the film. It demands you sit and process it.
Which brings us to what may be an obvious point, but one worth making nonetheless. There is another version of this movie that could have been made, one that would have seemed familiar to those who pay close, near-obsessive attention to those films that come out between the beginning of September and the end of December every year. Familiar, and likely with a comfortable enough distance not to truly leave someone shook to the core. The kind that makes viewers feel good about saying, “Yes, that was horrible, and thank god we’ve all learned a lesson here” in between reaching for the crudités and patting themselves on the back. The kind that recycles specific types of misery as “serious” entertainment to be consumed, complimented, and forgotten until the next round.
That is not the Nickel Boys that Ross has delivered unto us. There is little-to-no safe space between “us” and “them” onscreen. And while it’s easy to pay beaucoup attention to the stylistic flourishes that the cowriter-director and cinematographer Jomo May (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), it’s more painful — and much, much more rewarding — to focus on the why rather than the how. Much like last year’s The Zone of Interest, a film that almost feels like this adaptation is in conversation with, a genuine artist has peeled back the cinematic clichés that threaten to now overwhelm certain subjects and returned a horror, an urgency, and a palpable sense of life to them. What the filmmaker and his collaborators have given us is something truly special: a radical work of art that channels a tsunami of radical empathy. And it couldn’t feel more necessary or vital at this moment in time.
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