Despite the necessity of filling in the gaps of Black American history, viewers could be forgiven for feeling a little fatigued, after a decade of highly worthy but often gruelling stories of slavery, civil rights abuses and institutional racism, from 12 Years a Slave to Till to The Hate U Give to Get Out, and many more besides.
Nickel Boys is something very different: rather than more “trauma porn”, it gives us direct emotion, poetic imagery and radical invention. It owes more to Terrence Malick and Gaspar Noé than Ava DuVernay.
On one level, you could categorise it as another missing piece of the historical puzzle. The setting is a segregated reform school in remote 1960s Florida, based on the real-life Arthur G Dozier school, where past abuses and unmarked graves were uncovered in the early 2000s.
We follow doe-eyed Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a promising young student who’s cruelly condemned by association before he even gets to college, and thrown into what amounts to a juvenile prison, with its own rules and hierarchies and horrors. He falls in with Turner (Brandon Wilson), a more seasoned, more jaded inmate, and their fates intersect in ways we never quite understand until the final frames. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel, the story is a bracing blend of historical fiction, character drama and even prison-break thriller.
Not only does Nickel Boys have a powerful story to tell, it has an audacious way of telling it: the entire movie is shot in first person. We see everything through the eyes of either Elwood or Turner – the landscape, the minutiae of life, the characters’ own bodies or the faces of other characters (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as Elwood’s grandmother, makes a particularly powerful impression). The experience is vividly immersive and intimate. We’re not watching these people; we are them. Things aren’t happening to them; they’re happening to us.
As a technical feat, it’s almost unfathomable; as a viewing experience, it’s unforgettable; and as a way out of serving up yet more trauma porn, it’s ingenious.
Director RaMell Ross is a multidisciplinary artist more than a film-maker, and he seems to have approached this, his first feature film, with no baggage, let alone film-school training. Ross achieved a similar mix of lyricism and earthiness in his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, following ordinary Black life in rural Alabama. Nickel Boys goes even further: the point-of-view imagery becomes a collage of present-tense experience, gorgeous or ugly landscapes, fleeting impressions, details, memories, snatches of television and other media – something closer, perhaps, to waking life than conventional cinema.
As well as being floored by the feeling and the ambition of Nickel Boys, you’re left wondering why more movies aren’t made this way.
