“Nickel Boys” Both Stuns and Baffles

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024) 2 out of 5 stars

RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning, This Evening) is a filmmaker of no small visual talent, capable of bringing forth evocative images of uncommon beauty. In Nickel Boys—an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 The Nickel Boys novel, and Ross’s fiction-feature debut—he exercises his directorial muscles in all kinds of fascinating ways, combining abstract shots with elliptical editing. Unfortunately, the net result is a lot of fanfare and too little narrative. It’s a mess to decipher, and this powerful story would benefit from far greater dramatic simplicity.

It’s hard to invest in characters when we never stay with them long enough to understand what they think or how they feel. Ross chooses to photograph early sequences from the first-person point of view of one protagonist, then switches to that of the second protagonist before settling on a loose back-and-forth equation. But we are rarely on the face of the person experiencing an emotion in the moment.

Those two leads are Elwood (Ethan Herisse, The Virgin of Highland Park) and Turner (Brandon Wilson, Murmur), who meet at the notorious Nickel Academy in Florida, a reform school in what is still very much a Jim Crow South. Led by a sociopath named Spencer (Hamish Linklater, Downtown Owl), the institution does everything but reform anyone, if reforming is what they need, anyway. Elwood, for example, is picked up on his way to take college courses because he got into the wrong car at the wrong time. A promising student, he see his entire life derailed when he is sent to what is no better than prison for a crime in which he played no part.

The story follows the growing friendship between the two young men and their eventual plans to escape. Throughout, we cut to various stages of the future, encountering one of our characters in his future life. Eventually, this as-yet-unrecognized older version of one of the boys lives to see the sins of Nickel Academy uncovered, unmarked graves discovered on the long-disused site.

The movie tackles important themes that are no less vital today as they were in the time when the plot is set. The horrors of racism and child imprisonment are very much front and center. It’s too bad that the artistry gets in the way of everything, however. There is much ado about everything, with not enough attention paid to that which truly matters. It’s an intellectual exercise that is missing its heart, stunning to look at, empty to behold.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.