RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys

Well into the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, cowritten by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, a man in 2010s Harlem struggles to decide whether to come forward and testify after an investigation has been opened following the discovery of unmarked graves on the grounds of the Nickel Academy. Whitehead modeled the institution on the notorious Florida School for Boys (later renamed for one of its superintendents, Arthur G. Dozier), where young men—especially Black young men—were beaten, raped, tortured, and murdered for more than a hundred years before the school was shut down in 2011.

The camera hovers just behind the head of the man (Daveed Diggs), but Nickel Boys opens and spends most of its time in a world he remembers, the Floridian panhandle in the early 1960s. That world is first seen through the eyes of young Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) in a series of seemingly unmoored but intuitively guided point-of-view shots occasionally interrupted by both staged and genuine archival footage from the period.

“I hate to sound precious,” Ross tells Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, “but once I read the book, I thought POV. I thought poetry. I thought archival. It came pretty fast, because the way I entered the book aligned so much with my aesthetic values.”

Ross—an artist and photographer whose first feature, Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature—was “not interested in making a fiction film,” he says. But producer Dede Gardner “made The Tree of Life! And I thought, If I’m going to meet someone, I’ll meet her. Literally the only producer I’ve ever met to make a film, and I get asked all the time. I was hesitant at first, and I expressed my concerns that if we moved into the project, I’d have creative freedom, and Dede and Jeremy [Kleiner] were down.”

Elwood lives with his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and grows up to be an eager reader, a promising student, and an admirer of Martin Luther King played by Ethan Herisse. Hitching a ride to college, he’s picked up by a man driving a stolen car and gets arrested as an accessory to the crime. Clinging to his idealism, Elwood befriends a hardened realist at Nickel Academy, Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the point of view is suddenly handed off to Turner. “The switch, the swap,” says Ross to Ebiri. “It becomes more than a camera technique. It becomes a way in which these people are exchanging vitality.”

Cassie da Costa, who met Ross this fall for the Notebook, points out that “you’re not always seeing exactly what Elwood and Turner are looking at, but what Ross has chosen to look at through and as the boys: a leaf, a pair of shoes, the goosebumps on Elwood’s arm, a piece of grandma’s cake, a blood-soaked wall.” From Ross, da Costa learned that Nickel Boys is “intended as a response to questions posed in his manifesto, ‘Renew the Encounter,’ first published in Film Quarterly in 2019, a year after Hale County was released.”

“Ross both has and hasn’t given us a Great American Film,” writes Doreen St. Félix in the New Yorker. “Nickel Boys, with its intelligence and, surprisingly, its sentimentality, critiques the camera in American cinema. This is the kind of movie that gives and gives but holds back, too. It’s an exercise in powerful uncooperativeness, reserving some of the breadth of life from sight. This was the point, I think, in deleting the definite article from the title of the adaptation.”

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody put Nickel Boys at the top of his list of the best films of 2024. “As a first dramatic feature,” he writes in a follow-up review, “Nickel Boys is in the exalted company of such films as Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. Like them, it comprehensively creates a new way of capturing immediate experience cinematically, a new aesthetic for dramatizing history and memory.”

“The movie is sensuous, no doubt,” writes K. Austin Collins in the Atlantic, “and Nickel Boys belongs to an ongoing trend, in Black independent filmmaking, of pushing sensuousness to the fore—Moonlight being the most obvious example, Beyoncé’s Lemonade being the most visible, and a film like last year’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, which was shot by Nickel Boys’ cinematographer Jomo Fray, being the most similar.”

“Sight” is where W. E. B. Du Bois “crucially located Black difference,” writes Kelli Weston at Reverse Shot. “It is no accident, then, that this generation of Black filmmakers in particular are such studied disciples of the gaze. And it’s certainly no coincidence that this gaze claims so magisterial a place in the screen adaptations of Whitehead’s two Pulitzer Prize–winning novels (his most accessible, it might be argued), both of them, above all, ghost stories.”

Besides Nickel Boys, Weston is referring to Barry Jenkins’s 2021 adaptation of The Underground Railroad. In Variety’s collection of directors commenting on the films of the year they admire, Jenkins calls Nickel Boys “medium-defining work—aesthetically, spiritually—a rich and overwhelming cinema where the camera is always curious and what it finds is always arresting. In a time where there are more ways to make a film than ever (and yet less variation in the look, the feel, the shape of those films than in any other point in the medium’s history) RaMell has given us a new way of seeing.”

“Even when the story turns unbearably cruel,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “Ross insists on beauty as an imperative; it is, among other things, a rebuke to the annihilating ugliness of Nickel and to those who oblige its horrors.” For Ed Halter at 4Columns, Nickel Boys “unsettles primarily through indirection, suggestion, and lyrical montage. It is uninterested in depicting violence explicitly, but instead intent on studying the atmospheres that such oppression sustains.”