David Farnor | On 02, Mar 2025

Director: RaMell Ross
Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Jimmie Fails, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
Certificate: 15

There are books that are cinematic and there are films that are literary. Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead’s novel, is both these things and more – it’s lyrical.

Adapted for the screen by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes, the film follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a Black teenager in 1960s Florida who is arrested for stealing a car. He’s entirely innocent and wrongfully accused – we know because we see him unwittingly hitch a lift from the actual thief, only for the vehicle to pulled over by a police officer uninterested in anything beyond Elwood’s skin colour. And so he’s sent to the titular reform school, where his story gets darker.

Director RaMell Ross, though, takes his time to get to this point, instead letting us soak up Elwood’s life with a poetic half-hour of wistful, hopeful footage. Ross is a master of vibes, composing a collage of shots with a fragmented but harmonious feel that gives the impression we’re watching a livestream of Elwood’s memories – a sequence of his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) scraping icing from a knife is mesmerising.

We swiftly realise that this is all from Elwood’s perspective, and Ross sticks to that bold, first-person device throughout the film. Tellingly, we only get to see Elwood’s face for the first time when Ross changes to someone else’s first-person perspective: that of Turner (Brandon WIlson), a fellow Nickel boy. Alternating between each of their viewpoints, Ross ties them and us together with an bond that it is fundamentally impossible to experience Elwood’s story outside of.

There’s an intimacy to that awareness and recognition of each other that contrasts powerfully with the anonymous cruelty of the reform school. It’s an abusive place that is rife with brutality and racial prejudice, and Ross invites us to empathise with that depersonalisation with harrowing, powerful immediacy – often by avoiding showing us violence altogether, whether it’s Elwood diverting his gaze or Ross cutting to things such as footage from The Defiant Ones, starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis.

That intertextual storytelling is what elevates Ross’ story from a straightforward adaptation, prompting us to think about presentations of people’s stories, and of history, while also immersing us in the worldview of a young Black man passionately inspired to join the civil rights movement. The cast are impeccable, with Herisse and WIlson instantly convincing us of a lived-in friendship, and the sound and confining aspecto ratio echo the accomplished cinematography – the flawless match of form and content is quietly dazzling. But it’s testament to the impressive artistic flourishes that what sticks with you most of all are small moments from across the absorbing 140 minutes: a possible glimpse of Martin Luther King Jr in the street, a hug between a grandma and her grandson. What an achievement this is.

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