Nickel Boys review – Colson Whitehead novel becomes intensely moving story of a racist reform school

RaMell Ross’s transcendentally moving and frightening film, adapted from the 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, runs at least initially on a kind of cognitive dissonance. Its ecstatic, first-person images of childhood experience might point to happy memories, or possibly free-floating sensory epiphanies for which happiness or unhappiness is not relevant – and time-lapse shots here of the night sky incidentally reminded me of Ross’s lovely 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening.

But these memories, presented as such by enigmatic flashforward scenes, have tragedy encoded within them. There are however wonderful moments of humanity and hope; I don’t usually respond to “hug” moments in drama: and yet the (soon to be classic) scene here in which a woman has to hug her grandson’s friend in the absence of the grandson himself is overwhelming.

Elwood, played by Ethan Herisse, is an African American teenage boy in Tallahassee, Florida in the Jim Crow 60s, being brought up by his grandma (a wonderful performance from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and registering news about Martin Luther King and the Apollo space missions on TV. A bright kid in class, Elwood is encouraged to go to community college – and get involved in anti-racist activism – by his inspirational English teacher, but innocently hitching in a lift to that school in a stolen car lands Elwood in a reform school, the Nickel Academy (based on a notorious real-life institution), a miscarriage of justice to which the film proceeds with a kind of elliptical dream logic.

The flashy emerald-turquoise Impala in which Elwood is riding in the front passenger seat is pulled over by the cops, and then, not via arrest or courtroom scenes, but a quotation from Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis chained up in the back of the police van, Elwood arrives at the Nickel school with some white kids. It is a place of racism, abuse, violence and murder, where white boys are allowed to play football but black boys are forced to compete in rigged boxing matches and where unruly prisoners are beaten to death, then buried and officially written off as runaways. It is here that Elwood meets Turner, played by Brandon Wilson, who is to be his best friend and confidant.

Nickel Boys is shot entirely from a person’s single point-of-view – Elwood’s point-of-view at first, an approach that produces a dreamy or anxious subjectivity almost as a by-product. We at first glimpse Elwood’s face only indistinctly in his grandma’s steam iron, then the TV store window, and then in photo-booth pictures with his girlfriend, which is either a cheat or the film’s Lacanian mirror-stage.

You might compare it with first-person movies such as Robert Montgomery’s 1947 noir The Lady in the Lake or the opening sequence of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But after a while, of course, the paradox of identifying with what Elwood sees and experiences is that being deprived of his face means we in fact know less rather than more than usual about him (a movie problem, not a literary problem) and we need a third-person perspective. And this issue is solved by switching periodically to Turner’s point-of-view, sometimes replaying the same scene with overlaps, sometimes with shot-reverse-shot dialogue scenes with Elwood, a technique popularised by the Channel Four TV comedy Peep Show.

This approach brings the boys together structurally as nothing else could: the first time it happens it almost feels as if Elwood and Turner are saying and doing the same things in parallel universes; it makes them almost interchangeable, and this furthermore makes a greater kind of sense of their final destiny together, which is withheld from us until the very end.

The scenes in the Nickel are so immersive and vivid, that it is the later moments from the hero’s later adult life that feel more unreal: he is running a moving firm in New York City and brooding over online reports of unmarked graves found at the Nickel. And the awful irony is that Elwood sees that in the Nickel’s cruelty, bigotry and injustice, it is candid about political reality that the outside world isn’t: “In here, nobody has to act fake any more.” There are outstanding performances here from Ellis-Taylor, Herisse and Wilson, and Jomo Fray’s cinematography and Nora Mendis’s production design are exceptional too. This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.

• Nickel Boys screened at the New York film festival, and is released in the US on 25 October and in the UK on 8 November.