NICKEL BOYS: An Uneven Experiment In Perspective

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys follows a young man, Elwood (Ethan Herisse), as he is unjustly arrested and imprisoned in the Nickel Academy reform school for boys. There, he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and together the two try to stay alive. The film illustrates a deep, buried history of racist, abusive boarding schools in America, but it’s far more than just a history lesson. Most of the action in the film plays out from a first-person perspective, a cunning and complex formal style that has made critics fall in love with the movie.

Historical Context For Reform Schools

The plot bears similarities to Solomon Northup’s memoir (and the subsequent film) 12 Years a Slave, and maybe that’s the best place to begin. Not only is Elwood arrested for a crime he didn’t commit (car theft, in this case), but he’s basically a slave at Nickel Academy. The “students” are hired out to the school’s benefactors and other local residents for free labor, and in the school, they mostly perform menial labor under the stern gaze of teachers ready to beat them at a moment’s notice. The story of Nickel Boys proves that despite the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation and having a whole Civil War about it, America continued to find new ways to enslave Black people well into the 21st century.

The Dozier School for Boys, upon which Nickel Academy is based, was only closed down in 2011. At least 81 boys are estimated to have died there, some of whom were killed by staff. The film documents some of these abuses, including belt whippings, sweat boxes, and children locked in dryers. Unlike the novel, the film does not broach the subject of sexual abuse — it’s implied but never specifically mentioned — though it’s easy to imagine that there’s lots of cruelty Nickel Boys leaves off-screen. Some of the abusers who worked at this institution are still alive. Worse still, reform schools still exist in the U.S. — Agape Boarding School in Missouri, where hundreds of boys were sexually abused, only closed in 2023. And Mt. Meigs Reform School, where Black children were abused and traumatized for years, is still open.

Like 12 Years a Slave, the story of Nickel Boys is a deeply personal tale of captivity, abuse, violence, and the dream of emancipation. And like the film version of Northup‘s story, RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys is an intricately woven tone poem that depicts Black suffering through a highly personal perspective. You’ve likely never seen a movie like Nickel Boys. Time will tell whether this is a masterpiece and a bold new vision or simply a familiar story of racial oppression told in a gimmicky way.

I’m split on Nickel Boys. As a text, I think, the film is surprisingly empty — it’s a work that doesn’t tell you much about the characters’ circumstances or the context behind what we’re seeing. Despite its frequent cross-cutting with historical events such as the Selma march and with relevant historical films such as The Defiant Ones, Nickel Boys does not tell as much as it shows the racism and wretched conditions of the reform school. As a result, the most interesting stuff about the film is the Wikipedia research my wife was doing while the movie was playing, and occasionally we would pause the film to discuss the background of the reform schools and how NOBODY WENT TO PRISON FOR THIS.

Despite my misgivings, I don’t believe that one of the jobs of a film is to educate their audience. However, I would expect a documentarian like RaMell Ross to be at least somewhat interested in elucidating the historical context behind Nickel Boys for his audience, and it was disappointing that he didn’t think that was necessary. Reform schools, in my experience, are far less understood and far less publicized than indigenous residential schools, and they’re just as deserving of a didactic approach. Beyond the odd podcast and a smattering of articles, the abuses perpetrated at juvenile corrections facilities in the U.S. have mostly gone ignored. For many, myself included, Nickel Boys will likely be the first time they’re learning about these institutions.

Films this year have seemed allergic to explaining their context to the audience — Sugarcane comes to mind as another Oscar-nominated film operating within a complicated historical context yet refusing to elaborate beyond what the characters know and discuss. But education is a noble goal for a film, and I don’t think we should so easily ignore mainstream cinema’s potential to tell the audience something they might not already know.

Nickel Academy This Morning, This Evening

Looking at Nickel Boys as a film, I’m quietly impressed by Ross‘ direction and the unique albeit messy impressionistic haze of ideas he presents. The filmmaker behind the astounding Hale County This Morning, This Evening definitely knows how to be a fly on the wall, and many of the film’s best sequences rely on his keen ability to break a space down into small tangible elements — a lit cigarette, oranges on a tree branch, the way the light shines through slats in a wooden shed. The film is a deftly edited tapestry of such images, and that Ross is doing his own camera operating here helps these shots to feel enlivened as part of the fabric of the film rather than simple B-roll.

Performances are hit or miss for me — Ethan Herisse has a weathered, haunted look that’s perfect for Elwood, and Brandon Turner has a lovable blend of heart and hardness for Turner. This is probably a credit to the original novel, but I love that each of these characters is dynamic, complex, and interesting — within minutes of meeting them, we can tell pretty thoroughly what they want, how they see the world, and where they’re trying to go. As for the supporting cast, it’s always good to see Jimmy Fails, and Hamish Linklater is fine as the stern, abusive headmaster of Nickel Academy. I wish Nickel Boys had cast an actor with more presence, though, since Linklater‘s best skill is his ability to blend in with the background and disappear completely. I’m not on board the Fred Hechinger train, and this performance, I think, didn’t properly convey the contradictions and complexities of a multifaceted, despicable character. Especially in his addresses to camera, he felt like he wasn’t the right age for the part and also like he knows what an iPhone is. As with many young actors’ meteoric rises, suddenly Hechinger is everywhere, and I think it would have benefitted his career to have a more steady rise to fame. I get the sense that there’s a lot he doesn’t know yet about himself and about performing, but now he has to learn as he goes because he’s 25 years old and is doing six movies a year.

Then, there’s Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Of all the incredibly talented cast, Ellis-Taylor has been nominated for the most awards for her work here, but she gives the strangest performance in the film. Granted, she has one of the hardest jobs in Nickel Boys, to exhibit warmth and congeniality while also speaking directly to the camera as if it were her grandson. But she seems too young to play the part of a grandmother, and her line reads are often perplexing. Her invitation to Elwood to stay and eat cake with her, for example, feels like a line delivery from a recent M. Night Shyamalan movie. And her lines directly to camera, like when she asks for a hug from somebody, feel vaguely threatening.

Does The First-Person Perspective Work?

Your mileage will vary on how much you think the first-person perspective worked. For his part, Ross has very little to say about his artistic ambitions with this technique, and it seems to simply be a style of shooting he always wanted to do and Nickel Boys happened to be the film he used it on. One rare comment from the director on the style comes in a Screen Daily article: “I would hope the experiment of synchronizing a character’s relationship to the world with the audience’s encounters with that world would produce in the audience an inability to judge,” he said. 

I’m not sure the first-person POV is wholly successful. It calls attention to itself, and not in a way that enriches the film. The camera does not need to be a literal participant in the racist terror in order for the audience to experience it as racist terror — 12 Years a Slave would not be more harrowing if Steve McQueen strapped a GoPro to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s head. The camera does not need to become the character in order for the audience to identify with that character. Nickel Boys is well-observed, but not because its main character is a dude with a camera for a head. The visual style of the film, I’m inclined to say, is a gimmick that does not deepen our understanding of the film or its subject matter. Rather than engage more deeply with the material, we are constantly admiring the technique and the skill required to pull it off, or we are trying to discern which character’s head we’re in at the moment. All of these preoccupations get in the way of the drama. And in the final 10 minutes of the film, there’s a twist that the constantly switching first-person perspectives render nigh unintelligible — the way one shoots a film should not obscure its meaning.

As for the critical response to this perspective, I think it’s telling that, while there are many articles online explaining how the perspective was achieved, there are few that attempt to explain why it’s being used at all. One of the few that interrogates the stylistic choice is Kambole Campbell’s article for the BBC, in which journalist Ellen Jones argues, “The first-person position of the camera eliminates the voyeuristic distance from racist violence, which has been typical [in film], and inserts us in the subjectivity of the black characters.” But does it? Film is a voyeuristic medium, and to some degree, every movie ever made is voyeuristic. The act of filming something and presenting it to an audience makes them spectators and invites them to analyse their own activity within the drama; a first-person POV potentially makes that connection more tangible and asks the viewer to consider not only their own complicity in the violence depicted, but the character’s complicity as well. It also emphasizes the viewer’s cognitive dissonance, since the racist violence becomes instead a carefully choreographed routine performed for the benefit of the camera rather than an absorbing experience.

Art that seems to be entirely preoccupied with its own presentation is bound to alienate some of its audience. It’s why Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick movies always leave some viewers cold — when a story cares so much about how it’s told and not why, it ceases to be made for an audience and seems to be made more for the benefit of the artist or, perhaps, a coterie of critics who care more about the match cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey than they do the film’s themes and characters. The experimental impressionistic point-of-view Ross uses in Nickel Boys is as valid a way to tell a story as any other style, but this style for this story doesn’t work. Even if you love the style of Nickel Boys’ storytelling, the film still begs its audience to notice the conditions of its manufacture, and the story itself is the thing that suffers. The problem comes down to the subject matter — a subject as serious and complex as Southern reform schools requires a more straightforward approach to adequately convey the cruelty, racism, and oppression of that history. Richard Linklater made an experimental film where he follows the same cast over the course of 12 years, but he didn’t use that storytelling model to tell a story of suffering, moral crisis, or historical interest. He used it to make Boyhood. That’s the perfect example of a story whose telling, for better or worse, is the substance of the story. With Nickel Boys, no aspect of the story requires it to be told in the first person. It’s a style that exists for style itself.

Conclusion

At the very least, Nickel Boys is a powerful film. Its final minutes are an incredible feat of editing and composition, and throughout the film paints an evocative portrait of Black life in the Deep South in the 1960s. To be clear, as many reservations as I have about the style, I do think that Nickel Boys is a worthwhile artistic effort. I did not particularly like or appreciate the first-person POV, but I look forward to rewatching Nickel Boys purely for the experience. It feels like a movie that, at the very least, we’ll continue talking about for decades to come.

Nickel Boys is currently playing in cinemas and available to rent digitally.