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Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson in "Nickel Boys."
On the first day of his stay at Nickel Academy, the repressive reform school at the center of photographer, author, and filmmaker RaMell Ross’s debut narrative feature film Nickel Boys, a teenage Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) sees a group of boys playing football and expresses to a fellow Black student his eagerness to toss the ball around, too.
“No, they get to play football,” the student observes, pointing out that all of the players are white.
This passing moment points to a larger issue of systemic racism at Nickel Academy, where abuse is commonplace, and where the murders of several Black students will eventually be covered up. Nickel, which first appeared in Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, is based on Florida’s infamous Dozier School for Boys, where hundreds of young men were subjected to physical and sexual abuse throughout the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes resulting in their deaths. But while Nickel Boys takes place more than a half-century ago, Ross doesn’t offer viewers enough distance to dissociate themselves from the racial atrocities onscreen: When we see the white boys playing football, we see them through Elwood’s point of view, a formal innovation that lends the film an undeniable immediacy.
Elwood is a bright and bookish boy whose intellectual pursuits are supported by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and his teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), who strives to prevent his students from internalizing the racial hatred that inundates them. Mr. Hill recommends Elwood to take advanced classes at a local college, but he is instead sent to Nickel after being branded a criminal for accepting a ride from a man whose car turns out to be stolen. Between the hardened boys that surround him and the racist restrictions of Nickel’s headmaster, Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater), Elwood shrinks into himself—until he meets an outgoing Black student named Turner (Brandon Wilson), with whom he forges a bond that helps each boy maintain his sense of self within the school.
Ross frames the narrative almost exclusively through point-of-view shots, switching between the perspectives of Elwood and Turner. While this choice sometimes results in messy, unremarkable compositions resembling the artless way we look at things in everyday life, Ross more often finds images of beauty without breaking the conceit. The artfulness of Ross’s approach does not diminish the severity of the crimes inflicted upon the boys, but rather underscores it. If even the strongest boys at the school cannot defeat the abuse; if even Black adults such as the Nickel assistant administrator Percy (Sam Malone) participate in the abuse; if even friendly white kids such as Harper (Fred Hechinger) ignore the abuse: what can two outcasts like Elwood and Turner do? They can only watch. And because the film is framed through their eyes, we see it too.
Witnessing matters. When they feel most powerless, Turner and Elwood remind one another of this fact, a lesson they have learned from their elders. But as much as witnessing matters, fiction has a long and ignoble history of presenting Black suffering in a manner that draws entertainment value from spectacle. As the literary scholar Saidiya V. Hartman observes in her groundbreaking 1997 work Scenes of Subjection, countless narratives engage in this rubbernecking even while presenting themselves as stories that reveal and indict injustice.
Equally reprehensible are stories that invoke what Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the appendix to her abolitionist mega hit Uncle Tom’s Cabin, called an “atmosphere of sympathetic influence” to combat the horrors of slavery. This often takes the form of a heroic Caucasian who acts as white audiences’ comforting surrogate, the “right feeler” who does what they believe they would have done had they been there.
Nickel Boys offers white people no such out. All of the white characters—even the sympathetic Harper, who procures cushier jobs for Turner and Elwood, or the middle-class woman who lets the boys swim in her pool after they fix her house—play along within the unjust and destructive system.
The immediacy of Ross’s chosen point of view precludes any “right feeling” a white viewer might seek, while also collapsing the distance between the evils of the past and their effects in the present. Occasionally, the film flashes forward to scenes of an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame) in the 2010s, obsessing over the lost accounts of Nickel’s victims. Staring at his computer, Elwood tries to recover the names of boys who died and were forgotten, while Spencer is remembered in history books as a great humanitarian. In these scenes, we no longer see from Elwood’s point of view, but rather, from directly behind him, boring into the back of his head while he works as a furniture mover or drinks at a local watering hole. We become the ghosts of those forgotten boys, staring at him and demanding the justice he can bring by bearing witness and bringing to light the secrets buried at the Academy.
In one scene midway through the film, Hattie arrives at Nickel to meet with Elwood, but instead finds only Turner. Clearly disappointed and worried for her grandson, Hattie, who is played with unceasing sweetness, doesn’t miss the chance to take whatever connection she can get, and asks Turner for the hug she expected from Elwood.
Viewers might exhale in relief at this brief moment of kindness in a film so full of hate, but Ross doesn’t let anyone miss the setting’s latent horror. Turner sees the sadness in Hattie’s eyes, and therefore, so do we. In a later scene toward the end of the film, as Hattie lets loose with a cathartic cry that transcends both joy and sorrow, we are smothered in her hug, unable to extricate ourselves or rationalize her suffering. We simply witness and experience.
Nickel Boys provides no comfort through witnessing. In doing so, it demands that our witnessing turn to action—a recognition that the problems of the past demand a just response today.
Nickel Boys is now open in theaters nationwide.