Nickel Boys

UK Release Date. 3 January 2025
Certification. 12A
Running Time. 2 hours 20 mins
Director. RaMell Ross
Cast. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson.
Rating. 33%

Review.

Nickel Boys is the story of two black adolescents, Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, and their experience of The Nickel Academy - a fictional, all-male Tallahassee reform school [based on the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys] - in the 1960s. 

Films set in juvenile reform centres are ten a penny - Bad Boys (1983), Sleepers (1996), Boy A (2007), The Home Of Dark Butterflies (2008), King Of Devil's Island (2010), Coldwater (2014) and Consequences (2018). Director RaMell Ross could have easily adapted Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in a more conventional fashion for his feature-length debut. Instead, standard genre tropes are notably absent. No savage beatings. No merciless solitary confinement. No brutal homosexual molestation. Such incidents apparently take place but are banished off-screen. The director even employs words sparingly, searching instead for images of evocative memories to tell the story of a spirit crushed but not extinguished by unjust incarceration.

Indeed, rather than take a holistic view of the mistreatment visited upon the students of Nickel Academy, the film is focused almost exclusively on the lived experiences of Elwood and, latterly, Turner, at the expense of everything beyond their immediate field of vision. Literally, as a series of first-person impressions invites the viewer to inhabit the character's point of view and empathise with their pain and their fear. 

It is a bold decision, and an uncommonly adventurous one, for a studio to present a story from a first-person perspective, treating the point of view of the camera as the eyes and ears of the main protagonists. In essence, the audience's perception of events is entirely dependent on how much either character is capable of observing, or indeed, remembering. Other directors have tried this approach before and failed - Robert Montgomery's Lady In The Lake (1947), Gaspar Noé's Enter The Void (2010) and Ilya Naishuller's Hardcore Henry (2015) all spring to mind.

Ross intends for us to initially identify with Elwood, but a century of cinema has conditioned us to do that by looking at his eyes, rather than through them. When Turner (Brandon Wilson) enters the film, the camera begins to shift between the two characters’ points of view, and suddenly we get to see Elwood onscreen (played now by Ethan Herisse). Previously, we had only caught brief glimpses of him as a child, his face reflected in steam irons and shop windows. The switch in perspective between Elwood and Turner inaugurates a formal shift, one that is sadly too practised, unconvincing and frequently distracting. 

In refusing a conventional approach to suffering, Ross resists easy attempts at pathos. But while the director breaks free of the reform school tropes, he loses the plot in the process. The first-person viewpoint often diverts and distracts, and results in a narrative that lacks clarity and cohesiveness as Nickel Boys unravels, as multiple perspectives and timelines blur. An ambitious experiment that ultimately implodes.