During his career, writer/director RaMell Ross has worked primarily in documentaries, and he’s done it all there, with features (Hale County This Morning, This Evening), short films (Easter Snap), and television episodes (“Independent Lens”). Now, he’s trying his hand at narrative with the feature Nickel Boys.
Nickel Boys is about a young black man in Jim Crow Florida named Elwood (Ethan Herisse from The American Society of Magical Negroes) who is falsely accused of being an accomplice in a car theft and is sent to a reform school called The Nickel Academy. There, he makes friends with another boy named Turner (The Way Back’s Brandon Wilson), and the pair is forced to survive the corruption and abuse of the school.
RaMell Ross, along with co-writer Joslyn Barnes (Harvest, Báttu), adapted the screenplay for Nickel Boys from the 2019 novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead. The book (and, by extension, the film) was based on the infamous real-life Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Without spoiling anything about the movie, Dozier was a very bad place, and Nickel Boys doesn’t hold back on its portrayal.
There are really two components to Nickel Boys. There’s the story, and then there’s the presentation.
The story is one of those fascinatingly frustrating tales of injustice and racism. From early on in the film, even before Elwood gets arrested, the viewer can tell that there will be racial undertones, but when he gets to Nickel, everything is amplified. One especially telling scene occurs when a young Hispanic boy is playing football with the white boys and is asked to leave. The authorities admit that they don’t know where to put him in the segregationist school, but they do know that they don’t want him hanging out with the whites.
The racism is just the catalyst, though. The school itself is set up on a reward/punishment system, and you don’t need to have a degree in Race Studies to see which side gets the worst end of it. The African American boys are subjected to harder work, harsher sentences, and more gruelingly brutal punishments. And with every additional injustice and inequity, the audience just gets more and more angry.
So, yeah. Nickel Boys is a disturbing movie.
Then, there’s the presentation. Nickel Boys is shown from the points of view of both Elwood and Turner – literally. The camera sees what they see, and sometimes, the only way to tell whose head the camera is inside of is by whether or not the other is in the shot. As a documentary filmmaker, and as a cinematographer himself, Ross understands that this is a powerful way to tell his story. The audience is immersed in the school and all the violence within it – at least until the boy whose eyes that portion of the plot is told through blacks out from pain or illness. It’s not always 100% effective, but when it is, it’s eye-opening. The audience experiences the atrocities along with the boys.
There’s a realism to Nickel Boys that goes beyond the immersive point-of-view. RaMell Ross’ documentary experience has prepared him perfectly to make a movie like this. It feels like hard-hitting reporting wrapped in a dramatic package. The movie stands as both a scathing indictment of the reform school system and a harsh reminder of the racism that was present in the South during the mid-twentieth century. And RaMell Ross pulls no punches in showing his audience the realities of both corrupt practices.
Nickel Boys is not a documentary. But it may as well be. It has the same impact as one. Some viewers may be turned off by the changing points of view of the narrative. Others may be offended by the language or the violence, even if most of it is implied rather than shown. And still others just won’t want to hear what it has to say. Nickel Boys is powerful filmmaking. If RaMell Ross keeps going with narrative films, he’s got a bright future ahead of him.
GRADE: B
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violent content, some strong language, racial slurs, smoking, racism, and thematic material
Release Date: December 13, 2024 (Limited)
Running Time: 2 hours 20 minutes
Studio: Amazon MGM Studios
