Nickel Boys review – sublime, immersive adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s haunting reform school novel

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An unwritten rule of cinema is that great books very rarely make great movies. It’s not inevitable that a film adaptation of a literary classic will turn out to be a stinker, but plenty do: take Roland Joffe’s disposable and tawdry version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Brian De Palma’s notorious butchering of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, and my personal nadir, Peter Jackson’s mangling of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. There are ways of side-stepping the curse of the literary adaptation, of course, a recent example being Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a picture that kept the title and the location of Martin Amis’s novel but stripped away most of the flesh of the story to make way for Glazer’s chilling vision.

RaMell Ross’s astonishing Nickel Boys is something else altogether. Ross’s fiction feature debut (he previously directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening) is adapted by the director and co-writer/producer Joslyn Barnes from the Pulitzer-prize-winning 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, and it’s an extraordinary achievement. A version that is true to the book, honouring both its spirit and its structure, while also managing to be a genuinely groundbreaking cinematic work. This is a sublime piece of film-making.

The central character in the story is Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an early 1960s African American teenager in racially segregated Tallahassee, Florida. Raised by his doughty, loving grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Elwood is on track for academic excellence. Although still a high school student, he has been accepted on to a programme of classes at a college in a neighbouring town. On his way to the first of these, fate deals a devastating blow. Elwood accepts a lift in a flash car driven by a sharply dressed Black man, a smooth-talking dandy dripping with gold and good humour. But the vehicle is stolen and Elwood soon learns that his plea of being in the wrong place at the wrong time isn’t going to cut any ice with the cops. He is shipped off to a state-run reform school, the Nickel Academy, where the brutality and cruelty experienced at the hands of the racist guards is mitigated, in part at least, by the close friendship he forms with another boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson).

It’s a wrenching, enraging story. But what gives the film its savage potency is Ross’s radical and daring formal approach. This is a picture that on a fundamental level demands that we relearn our way of looking. The most immediately striking of Ross’s techniques is his decision to shoot the film almost entirely from the point of view of its two central characters, Elwood and Turner. The early part of the film, a patchwork of frayed memories from Elwood’s early years, evokes a child’s eye drawn to sparkles and shiny baubles. The camera tracks the infant Elwood’s gaze, ensnared by a gold bangle on his mother’s arm. Through the wisps of overheard conversation that float through the room like cigar smoke we grasp that this is a goodbye party for Elwood’s parents, and is likely to be the last time he sees them.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Hattie in Nickel Boys.

This POV device is disorientating at first, but it soon becomes clear just how effective it is. We experience the sickening challenge of the bullet-eyed stare of a white man locking on to the lens and looking for a reason to attack; we share Elwood’s instinctive response, to drop his gaze to his shoes and avoid confrontation. In another bruising glimpse of casual discrimination, an elderly man with a smirk of triumph and the tacit backing of a cop prods his walking stick just below the camera lens and into Elwood’s guts. Our glimpses of Elwood’s face, caught in reflections in the polished chrome of an electric iron, or the glass of a shopfront, are treasurable moments.

Most notably, there are two moments of unbearable poignancy featuring Ellis-Taylor, laying out the truth for her grandson, that we watch through his eyes. Another devastating encounter is a chance meeting in a New York bar between the much older Elwood (Daveed Diggs) and another former Nickel boy, Chickie Pete (Craig Tate, delivering the most blistering single scene performance of the past year).

The POV shooting style would not be nearly as effective, however, were it not for the quality of the craft elsewhere. The sound design, for example, is a delicate, intricate tapestry that is every bit as meticulously detailed as the production design. And the scrapbook collage of archive footage is crucial to the film’s potency – a device that adds weight and context to the story, and which tightens the threads between timelines that extend almost up to the present day. A masterpiece.