A Muddled Mess: "The Nickel Boys" Suffocates Under Visual Chaos

Being abstract is one thing, and being confusing is another.

One of the oddest films that I have ever seen.

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Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisse in Nickel Boys (2024)

This can be a three-day job we play it right. We till the garden and fix up her house, she may even adopt our black asses. Well not you, you got family. I'd yessum her for a chance out of Nickel.

That ain't no freedom. I mean you know Director Hardee and his wife ain't supposed to use us like we're slaves.

Man, all those guys on the school board have us do chores. Sometimes it's favors, sometimes it's for real money.

Man, the law's one thing. You can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convince enough white people. I saw those college kids in Tampa with their nice shirts and ties sitting at the Woolworth's. I had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened, they opened that counter. But I didn't have the money to eat there either way. Gotta change the economics of all this, too.

My grandma got me that lawyer, man. Make a move there, first.

The courts play both the white and the black. They just move us around when they're ready.

And we have to be like knights. Checkmate.

How many people you know done that, El? There's four ways out of Nickel. Serve your time -or age out-. Court might intervene -if you believe in miracles-. You could die -they could kill you-. You could run. Only four ways out of Nickel.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Nickel Boys (2024)

Ethan Herisse

Brandon Wilson

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

RaMell Ross

Joslyn Barnes

Colson Whitehead

A powerful friendship develops between two young Black men as they navigate the harrowing trials of reform school together.

Nickel Boys

nope

&quot;Nickel Boys&quot; is a strikingly assured and ambitious debut fiction-feature from director RaMell Ross. It is composed almost entirely of POV shots. This has been tried a hand-full of times before in film history, perhaps most famously in the &apos;40s noir, &quot;The Lady of the Lake&quot;, but never as intricately and effectively as it is here.

&quot;Nickel Boys&quot; is bi-perspectival. We experience the gazes of two different characters, Elwood and Turner, teenagers incarcerated in a Jim Crowe-era juvenile detention center that amounts to a borderline death-camp for its Black prisoners. I was struck by the similarities and differences between &quot;Nickel Boys&quot; and &quot;Hunger&quot;, another overpowering work on life-in-detention. The older film is about the body to a visceral degree that few other movies have attempted and the result is a work of relentless objectivity. &quot;Nickel Boys&quot;, by contrast, is about the effects of trauma and imprisonment on the mind and memory- a relentlessly subjective piece.

The tone is thus very different from that of most bleak prison dramas, at times almost affirmational. We&apos;re experiencing, literally seeing, the way Elwood and Turner view their conditions in ways that make their situation tolerable- largely by focusing on their friendship- each other&apos;s faces- and those of their loved ones. This is not to say that the film is artificially pleasant. One of the best scenes consists of a single long take of a conversation in a bar years after the events depicted in most of the film have taken place. It&apos;s a remarkably well staged and performed scene featuring brief but memorable work by actor Sam Malone as Percy, one of the detention center&apos;s survivors, uttering the horrors he witnessed in a tone that suggests that even years later he can barely cope with what he saw. Experiences like those inflicted on the characters perhaps cause more damage after the fact than during the actual experience when survival instinct takes over.

The bi-perspectival construction of the film also demonstrates the ways that experiences and memories are never fully constructed or belonging to any one individual. Elwood and Turner, for all of their differences, come to seem almost like one character. We start to forget, or care, about whose perspective we are viewing. These men are forging this part of their lives together- they are co-authors of each other&apos;s experience. In this sense, &quot;Nickel Boys&quot; is about themes larger than imprisonment and injustice. It&apos;s about the ways that time and memory enact experience, both making it palatable but in the process leaving defining scars. The film&apos;s final montage features images of cellular reality- our being recreating itself through creation and destruction even within a single lifetime.

&quot;Nickel Boys&quot; is not a perfect movie. Ross&apos;s previous work had been as a documentarian and the script he co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes and Colson Whitehead is characterized by some clunky, overly on-the-nose dialog. However, this makes the powerful performance of said dialog by stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, and especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood&apos;s grandmother, all the more impressive.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys chronicles the powerful friendship between two young African American men navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.

Official Trailer 2

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMDRhZTA4YjctMGMxMS00Njc4LWIxMTItNGU2ZDYxYTljZmI5XkEyXkFqcGdeQWFybm8@._V1_.jpg

"Nickel Boys" is a strikingly assured and ambitious debut fiction-feature from director RaMell Ross. It is composed almost entirely of POV shots. This has been tried a hand-full of times before in film history, perhaps most famously in the '40s noir, "The Lady of the Lake", but never as intricately and effectively as it is here.

"Nickel Boys" is bi-perspectival. We experience the gazes of two different characters, Elwood and Turner, teenagers incarcerated in a Jim Crowe-era juvenile detention center that amounts to a borderline death-camp for its Black prisoners. I was struck by the similarities and differences between "Nickel Boys" and "Hunger", another overpowering work on life-in-detention. The older film is about the body to a visceral degree that few other movies have attempted and the result is a work of relentless objectivity. "Nickel Boys", by contrast, is about the effects of trauma and imprisonment on the mind and memory- a relentlessly subjective piece.

The tone is thus very different from that of most bleak prison dramas, at times almost affirmational. We're experiencing, literally seeing, the way Elwood and Turner view their conditions in ways that make their situation tolerable- largely by focusing on their friendship- each other's faces- and those of their loved ones. This is not to say that the film is artificially pleasant. One of the best scenes consists of a single long take of a conversation in a bar years after the events depicted in most of the film have taken place. It's a remarkably well staged and performed scene featuring brief but memorable work by actor Sam Malone as Percy, one of the detention center's survivors, uttering the horrors he witnessed in a tone that suggests that even years later he can barely cope with what he saw. Experiences like those inflicted on the characters perhaps cause more damage after the fact than during the actual experience when survival instinct takes over.

The bi-perspectival construction of the film also demonstrates the ways that experiences and memories are never fully constructed or belonging to any one individual. Elwood and Turner, for all of their differences, come to seem almost like one character. We start to forget, or care, about whose perspective we are viewing. These men are forging this part of their lives together- they are co-authors of each other's experience. In this sense, "Nickel Boys" is about themes larger than imprisonment and injustice. It's about the ways that time and memory enact experience, both making it palatable but in the process leaving defining scars. The film's final montage features images of cellular reality- our being recreating itself through creation and destruction even within a single lifetime.

"Nickel Boys" is not a perfect movie. Ross's previous work had been as a documentarian and the script he co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes and Colson Whitehead is characterized by some clunky, overly on-the-nose dialog. However, this makes the powerful performance of said dialog by stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, and especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood's grandmother, all the more impressive.

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