NICKEL BOYS. There is a school of thought among filmmakers (Friedkin springs to mind, probably some of the French New Wavers), which holds that the camera must have a distinct point of view, that it cannot simply be an omniscient third-party observer. This flies in the face of some deeply held values among cineastes (read: film bros), who uphold a notion with equal conviction that the camera is the untethered godhead of the film set, the roving eyes and legs of the director’s grand vision. I fall somewhere between the two camps and, in my customary way, can occasionally find endorsement of either viewpoint overly strong, even repugnant in its proselytizing. But if I’m being honest, it was always the impossibility of the moving camera, the choreography of complex single takes and the power of the edit that drew me to movies as an artform and a means of communication. It is, after all, the most technologically complex amalgamated means of conveying emotions and ideas that we’ve got. Plus, focusing on the craft makes it easier not to have to directly engage with the feelings in the thing.
Which is, most likely, why I’ve chosen such a pedantic approach to Nickel Boys, both a towering achievement in terms of its artistic and technical method, but also a story that will leave in its wake as much emotional wreckage as aesthetic appreciation.
The first scripted feature from director RaMell Ross (previously nominated for an Academy Award for the documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening; 2018), who adapted Colson Whitehead’s novel with Joslyn Barnes, Nickel Boys describes the wrongful adolescent imprisonment of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) in a Florida honor-farm torture academy for Black boys. After accepting a ride from the wrong guy on his way to matriculation at a newly founded free college, Elwood is railroaded into a life of forced labor, torture and disconnection from his family and the world at large. He does manage to befriend another student (read: inmate) named Turner (Brandon Wilson), who, despite his world-weary aspect, admires Elwood’s intellectualism and adherence to notions of hope, decency and the possibility for change.
I am woefully underread of the Whitehead catalog, but I have taken in enough to appreciate the fact that he applies (or can apply) a light anachronistic touch to his depictions of this country’s treatment of its Black citizens. And while I may not always love his stylistic flourishes, I certainly appreciate them. Further, it makes perfect sense to me that adapting them to the screen would require both a fealty to the material and the ability to work within the flexibility of the medium to which it is being adapted. Ergo Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of The Underground Railroad (2021) and now Ross’ astoundingly beautiful, technically bravura version of Nickel Boys.
Shot almost entirely from the first-person perspective, but alternating between Elwood and Turner’s points of view, and then transitioning decades into the future with discomfiting over the shoulder shots, Ross’s movie brings us inside the events of its story in a more intimate, more thoughtfully constructed mode than, in my memory, any other movie that has attempted the approach. Historically, the first-person perspective, while obviously immersive, has largely been deployed as a sort of prolonged parlor trick, a means to impress the audience with extended action sequences or gotcha jump scares. Here though, Ross uses the camera in a more meaningful, insightful (and technically challenging) way than almost any director before him. Rather than using its fixed perspective to trick us or to conceal, his camera becomes an agent of truth in storytelling, unrivaled in its capacity for both clarity and surprise.
Backgrounded by the exploration of space and the nascent hope of the Civil Rights movement, Nickel Boys defies the supposed inherent limitations of its perspective by reminding us that our worldview is, in fact, our entire world. It also happens to more fully recreate its period, the atmosphere of its place and time, than most. In its textural representation of Florida in the mid-1960s, it conjures the journalism of James Agee and the (sometimes maudlin) totality of late-period Malick; totally immersive, but with a propulsive, consummately engaging narrative throughline.
This is as good a movie as I’ve seen from last year, and it is as meritorious as the movie nerds made it out to be. Just a shame that we have to pay a tech company to watch it. PG13. 140M. PRIME.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in 2025 NCJ Pet Photo Contest Winners.