‘Nickel Boys’ Is an Artful Apparition of Betrayed Black Youth

Nickel Boys (opening Friday, Jan. 3) is a slippery ghost story in which the dead and the living, the past and the present, and the real and the fictional, are intermingled. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’ gorgeous, gossamer fable of 1960s racial injustice seems to slip through our fingers even as we’re watching it, such that its sleight-of-hand eludes us until after the lights come up.

That is not meant entirely as a compliment. When all the pieces finally click together, it feels like a jab rather than a gut punch. The cleverness of the storytelling, along with the beauty of the filmmaking, camouflages and dilutes the blow. That’s a serious miscalculation for a film whose underlying foundation is the systemic murders of young Black men in a state institution and the cover-up of those deaths.

The place is the Nickel Academy, a segregated reformatory in southern Florida. The time is the mid-’60s, when the Civil Rights Movement and landing on the moon both seem like long-shot propositions. Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), an honest, naïve teenager heading to college, is sent instead to Nickel for the crimes of being in the wrong place and being Black.

We know Elwood is a straight arrow because we’ve spent the first 30 minutes growing up with him. In fact, Ross and director of photography Jomo Fray go so far as to shoot everything from Elwood’s point of view — literally — with the aim of putting us in his shoes, if not his skin. The strategy has an unfortunate counter-effect, however; by calling attention to itself, it distances us from the character rather than making us identify with him.

Impressionistic visuals conjure Elwood’s adolescent state of mind along with the summery state of the union: One sequence begins with a shot of an arm lazily extended in the grass, then the camera (i.e., the character) turns to look up at oranges dangling in the tree overhead. The plot is conveyed through brush strokes: ridges in his mother’s gold bracelet, pencils stuck in the ceiling of a classroom, a girl’s shy smile, his Nana Hattie’s cake.

So many first-rate dramas about the Black experience (from 12 Years a Slave to Moonlight to 2024’s Sing Sing, The Piano Lesson, Exhibiting Forgiveness and Blitz) have been made in the last decade that one infers Ross felt free to embrace the ephemeral aesthetic of the arthouse instead of the pulp of melodrama.

In fact, the director’s inclusion of snippets from The Defiant Ones, Stanley Kramer’s 1958 prison-escape flick with Sidney Poitier handcuffed to Tony Curtis, can be read as both plot foreshadowing and a mockery of the 20th-century notion that earnest mainstream movies can make us better people. (Another dig at Hollywood comes from Turner, whom we will meet at the Nickel Academy and says about running away, “You can’t wash the scent off. That’s only in movies.”)

While the first 45 minutes or so of Nickel Boys repeatedly alludes to the brutality of the Jim Crow South, it lacks a certain force because it’s filtered through the eyes of an innocent youth. When Elwood is shipped off to Nickel for being an unwitting passenger in a stolen automobile — on his way to college, irony of ironies — we don’t quite grasp the circle of hell he has entered.

Nickel (standing in for the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where more than 50 unmarked graves were discovered in 2012) is a cloistered camp where the white kids laugh and play football, biding their time until their sentences are completed, while the Black kids are warehoused and any infraction (like fighting among themselves) is punished with a late-night whipping. Retribution is even more extreme if a Black internee does something, like failing to take a dive in the third round of a boxing match, that goes against the interests of the white men who run the joint.

Elwood lacks the experience and street smarts to navigate Nickel, but he catches a break when Turner (Brandon Wilson), a veteran inmate, befriends him. Turner cannily extricates Elwood from the routine of hard-labor jobs, arranging for the younger man to help him do some light painting at one of the low-level bosses’ houses and, pivotally, ride along when that underling sells pilfered Nickel supplies to local restaurants.

As time goes on, Nickel Boys turns and twists Elwood and Turner into, well, not brothers but twins, who merge and swap roles and identities. While the film nods at the dehumanizing idea that all young Black men are the same to white people, it’s primarily exploring the literary and symbolic and thematic implications of character transference.

When Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) comes to Nickel to visit Elwood, for example, she can’t get permission to see him but meets Turner by chance. Their conversation (filmed from Turner’s POV) is odd and portentous, and takes on a different meaning after all the events play out.

Hattie and Elwood, you see, are convinced that justice will reign and his sentence will be overturned. Turner, much more of a realist, knows their trust in the system is misplaced. And after the compromised boxer sees self-sacrifice as the only available form of protest, Turner resolves to escape.

Elwood likewise concludes that he has to be the author of his own destiny. “No one else is gonna get me out of here,” he tells Turner. “It’s not an obstacle course. You can’t go around it, then you have to go through it. And walk with your head up no matter what they throw at you.”

Alas, Elwood still believes in an objective notion of justice. He’s recorded every delivery, payoff and off-the-books chore in his notebook, a wire-bound volume he is convinced will expose Nickel and bring it crashing down.

Nickel Boys is a tragedy of promise and potential smashed by embedded injustice and individual betrayals. If the dead are ghosts, the living are zombies. Hollowed-out shells, scarred by the lawless suffering of their formative years, going through the motions of daily life with the help of drink, drugs or the tenuous hope that they might someday give testimony and justice may yet be served.

An optimist may see all the skill and beauty and art applied to Nickel Boys as an affirmation of life and its possibilities. I, however, am stuck in space with the Nickel boys: Exit velocity is unattainable.

‘Nickel Boys’ opens in Bay Area theaters on Jan. 3, 2025.