Nickel Boys review – a miracle of a movie | Little White Lies

Nick­el Boys review – a mir­a­cle of a movie

18 Dec 2024 / Released: 03 Jan 2025

Pensive Black man with serious expression in natural setting.
Pensive Black man with serious expression in natural setting.
5

Anticipation.

Anything from RaMell Ross is cause for celebration.

5

Enjoyment.

There are about a dozen of the best shots I have ever seen in a movie.

5

In Retrospect.

The defining American film of the 2020s.

With this adap­ta­tion of Col­son White­heads Pulitzer Prize-win­ning nov­el, film­mak­er RaMell Ross deliv­ers 2024’s most har­row­ing and tran­scen­dent film.

At one point in Nick­el Boys, Elwood, a young Black boy in Civ­il Rights-era Flori­da, glimpses Mar­tin Luther King Jr. in front of a super­mar­ket and takes off, run­ning across the mid­dle of the street to greet him.

Turn­er, his best friend, chas­es behind him. When he catch­es Elwood, he asks him what’s wrong. Elwood smiles, bash­ful. Turn­er looks over to see a card­board cut-out of MLK. We’ve encoun­tered the preach­er mul­ti­ple times in the film – on a vinyl record, through a win­dow dis­play of a dozen tele­vi­sions, from teach­ers who mis­quote his ser­mons. Yet for a moment, to Elwood, it looked like he was real­ly there, just a few feet away, next to the pro­duce stand in the mid­dle of some city street. The most bril­liant part of this scene is not the choice to lit­er­alise the two boy’s vast­ly dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ships to the most vis­i­ble, idolised black man in Amer­i­ca, nor is it the fact that this scene imme­di­ate­ly fol­lows the one time we will ever see both boys on-screen at the same time. It’s that, for a split-sec­ond, that cut-out real­ly does look like King.

The entire­ty of RaMell Ross’ nar­ra­tive fea­ture debut is shot in first-per­son. This is the kind of con­ceit that feels too exper­i­men­tal, too grandiose, to make it past a pitch meet­ing, let alone result in a suc­cess­ful film. Yet the first of many mir­a­cles of Nick­el Boys is that it exists, a $20 mil­lion movie with the kind of for­mal rigour typ­i­cal­ly reserved for under­ground and instal­la­tion art.

Ross’ fea­ture debut, the non-nar­ra­tive doc­u­men­tary Hale Coun­ty This Morn­ing, This Evening, pho­tographed con­tem­po­rary black life in the South­east­ern Unit­ed States with an unpar­al­leled impres­sion­is­tic inti­ma­cy and an envi­able knack for iden­ti­fy­ing and cap­tur­ing spon­ta­neous­ly beau­ti­ful imagery. That same ethos proves equal­ly fruit­ful here. His sec­ond film fol­lows Elwood (played by the mon­u­men­tal­ly gift­ed Ethan Herisse), an ide­al­is­tic teenage Free­dom Fight­er sent to the Nick­el reform school after being wrong­ful­ly arrest­ed for car theft.

The open­ing half-hour, how­ev­er, is a pro­ces­sion of loose­ly con­nect­ed vignettes from Elwood’s youth. Ross invites the audi­ence to embody Elwood through a sen­so­ry sim­u­la­tion. Dream­like moments of appar­ent hap­pen­stance, the kind nor­mal­ly found in an edit amidst hours of unused footage, are engi­neered whole­sale from Ross’ imag­i­na­tion, with a large- scale peri­od-accu­rate recre­ation of 1960s Tal­la­has­see to match. Ross com­pos­es such painter­ly shots in a way that feels con­jured from real mem­o­ries: a mag­net slid­ing down the ice­box door, two women’s legs mov­ing in per­fect uni­son at a shop counter, the sound of Elwood’s grand­moth­er scrap­ing icing off a knife with the ridges of a glass cake stand.

This foun­da­tion­al emo­tive lens grows increas­ing­ly more intri­cate as the film goes on, even­tu­al­ly becom­ing an ouroboros of vic­ar­i­ous expe­ri­ence attempt­ing to recon­struct the ghosts of a past that haunts those forced to relive it. The open­ing invites the audi­ence to embody a young Black boy, the polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions of which Ross pro­ceeds to delib­er­ate­ly subvert.

The first major devi­a­tion comes when Elwood first meets Turn­er (Bran­don Wil­son), and, in a flash, the audi­ence is final­ly allowed to see through a sec­ond pair of eyes, final­ly wit­ness­ing the boy we have hith­er­to only under­stood through the tilt of his own reti­nas. Turn­er is more cyn­i­cal than Elwood, hav­ing already run away once from Nick­el, with no fam­i­ly or future to speak of. The two form a deep friend­ship, a close­ness com­mu­ni­cat­ed. A less­er direc­tor would use this to cheat’ in more con­ven­tion­al filmmaking.

Ross instead uses their shared posi­tion­al­i­ty to inter­ro­gate the boys’ agency as they find them­selves rou­tine­ly anonymised and dehu­man­ised by the world around them.

The sec­ond depar­ture comes as Elwood is whipped by the academy’s own­er, the cam­era mov­ing out from first per­son and train­ing itself on the back of his skull, as if attached to a rig on his back. The world robs him, at this moment, of a per­spec­tive. Telling­ly, this angle appears again in the non-lin­ear inter­ludes which fol­low an old­er Elwood through­out the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, as rev­e­la­tions about the reform school become pub­lic knowl­edge dur­ing an investigation.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning nov­el by Col­son White­head, Nick­el Boys is not, strict­ly speak­ing, a true sto­ry. The film, how­ev­er, draws heavy inspi­ra­tion from the Dozi­er School, where near­ly a hun­dred black boys were mur­dered up until 1973. The film, like Whitehead’s book, is deeply con­cerned with what it means, as a Black Amer­i­can artist, to share the sto­ries of those who have suf­fered under white suprema­cy, the ways that such a task requires fic­tion­al­is­ing and pro­ject­ing one­self onto strangers and loved ones alike. Ross grap­ples with the deper­son­al­i­sa­tion that comes not just from racialised vio­lence, but also the per­sis­tent obfus­ca­tion of the nation’s history.

Hands clasped together, fingers intertwined, against wooden surface, blue abstract background.

Through­out the film, Ross inter­cuts ephemer­al footage from across America’s past. These clips, though they osten­si­bly break the rules’ of the film, are as much a part of Elwood and Turner’s world­view as any drama­tised seg­ment. What is absent from Nick­el Boys, on the oth­er hand, is on-screen racialised violence.

Scenes such as the afore­men­tioned whip­ping instead opt for a kind of gru­elling mon­tage of audio­vi­su­al cacoph­o­ny and frac­tured digi­ti­sa­tions of con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous pho­tographs. Ross offers a damn­ing indict­ment of archival process that doc­u­ment acts of racism – the dearth and manip­u­la­tion of such images to fit digestible his­to­ri­ogra­phies deny the incom­pre­hen­si­ble truth of its own scale.

Were Nick­el Boys mere­ly a gal­vanis­ing accom­plish­ment in post-colo­nial essay film­mak­ing, that would be enough. It is dou­bly won­drous, then, that the film itself is a riv­et­ing­ly con­struct­ed, impres­sive­ly sub­tle work of dra­matur­gy. As a work of lit­er­ary adap­ta­tion, the script’s inge­nious devi­a­tions and abbre­vi­a­tions do won­ders to trans­late its ideas into the­atri­cal ana­logues. Often, the audi­ence is forced to ori­ent them­selves with­in a shot in media res, giv­ing the film a sur­pris­ing­ly propul­sive rhythm. Herisse and Wil­son sell the film; a movie like this could only work with two actors who can con­vince the lens itself that it’s some­body they know, some­body real, some­body they love. Most­ly, it’s just a real­ly good sto­ry, per­formed with con­sum­mate pathos and writ­ten with stag­ger­ing grace.

It is easy to make Nick­el Boys sound far sim­pler than it is. That it winds up a pro­found­ly acces­si­ble stu­dio film is not proof that its high-mind­ed aes­thet­ic and polit­i­cal ambi­tions have been neutered. Ross’ avant-garde imagery is so intu­itive that it buoys more straight­for­ward ele­ments of the piece with­out fore­go­ing aca­d­e­m­ic lucid­i­ty. Every dra­mat­ic manœu­vre and rev­e­la­tion with­in the plot is echoed and com­pli­cat­ed by the sur­round­ing visu­als. The result­ing effect is nei­ther instruc­tion­al or redun­dant; rather, the visu­als and the plot entwine as deft­ly and ele­gant­ly as I’ve ever seen in an Amer­i­can stu­dio picture.

Nick­el Boys remains a dizzy­ing­ly accom­plished, dense, and sear­ing dia­tribe on the dis­so­ci­a­tion inflict­ed upon the oppressed by insti­tu­tion­al vio­lence, the ways Amer­i­can soci­ety dehu­man­is­es and anonymis­es black men as dis­pos­able mar­tyrs. It is also, by mere fact of its release, a mon­u­men­tal­ly inspir­ing cin­e­mat­ic feat. Despite Ama­zon MGM clear­ly aim­ing for an awards push, Nick­el Boys prob­a­bly won’t win Best Pic­ture; every oth­er fron­trun­ner would be a more fash­ion­able choice. Yet I can­not imag­ine an Eng­lish-lan­guage film from this decade that will have a greater impact on future gen­er­a­tions, on the ways they under­stand filmic gram­mar and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the medi­um. Nick­el Boys is a mas­ter­piece – more­over, it is a miracle.

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