RaMell Ross Creates One of the Best of 2024 in First Narrative Feature
DIRECTOR: RAMELL ROSS/2024
Whatever justice is, it doesn’t look like Nickel Academy.
When Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is sent to the juvenile boys’ reform school, it’s only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. While he and his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) hope for an appeal, he’s doomed to wait in the worn khaki uniforms doled out to his side of the institution in segregated 1960s Florida. The supervisors promise the boys if they complete their assigned manual labor and respect their authority, they will be home soon. But the only person who will show Elwood the ropes firsthand is returning Nickel resident Turner (Brandon Wilson), who believes the system is rigged against them.
Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, takes inspiration from a real reform school responsible for a century of abuse and murder. (Though Whitehead’s story centers on the ‘60s, the real school survived until 2011.) RaMell Ross’s interpretation of the novel, however, doesn’t match anything you might expect of an Oscar-hopeful adaptation of a prize-winning book. Familiar? Traditional? Safe? In the last decade, the Academy has shown plenty of love toward films focusing on the mid-century struggle against Jim Crow (even awarding one Best Picture), but Nickel Boys looks and feels nothing like them.
Some films are described as a “gut punch”—Nickel Boys feels more akin to stacking sand bag after sand bag on top of your chest.
Ross’s documentary background informs a style so unusual for a historical drama it may unsettle general audiences, but it’s not artfulness for its own sake. Shooting from a first person point-of-view is a narrative device almost as old as film—it’s a key feature of my favorite Bogie-Bacall picture, 1947’s Dark Passage—and 2024 also brought us In a A Violent Nature, a horror movie from the slasher’s perspective. Nickel Boys flips between Elwood and Turner’s eyes for its entire 140 minutes (including flash forwards to Elwood’s perspective as an adult, played by Daveed Diggs), and in spite of a handful of wait-who-am-I-now moments, the gimmick more than pays off. Another filmmaker—in fact, many a filmmaker—could have turned Whitehead’s novel into formulaic docudrama or a lachrymose guilt trip. Instead, Ross turns it into a memory piece, one so well-suited to this plot and these characters that a traditional telling feels cheap to imagine in its place.
To switch between their viewpoints is to live through their ongoing debate, trying on Elwood’s optimism for progress, then succumbing to Turner’s pessimism based on past experience. It also forces its audience into empathy, experiencing the same beatings, separation, and fear the boys at Nickel do. Some films are described as a “gut punch”—Nickel Boys feels more akin to stacking sand bag after sand bag on top of your chest. With baleful glimpses and whispers, the dread builds, crushing your heart and lungs deeper into the dirt. At almost two-and-a-half hours, this is a tough sell for a night out at the movies, and even those who leave with a glowing review can admit it’s too much. The film feels most authentic and alive with these boys’ spirits when it’s flitting through their streams of consciousness; it drags when it lingers through cumbrous detail most minds wouldn’t recall decades later. (Perhaps a tighter cut would have made a stronger case for an Ellis-Taylor Oscar run, whose warmth is reduced to a very supporting role with this runtime.) But even with 20 more minutes than it needs, I won’t argue if you name it your best film of the year. At its highest highs (including a knockout ending), Ross’s debut narrative feature is both extraordinary and devastating, and it’s an exploration of self-perception and identity we won’t be forgetting once Awards Season has ended.
