Review: Nickel Boys

Image courtesy of MGM Studios.

It's often the case that my favorite movies are not based on great novels - and that my favorite novels are often better than the film adaptations. This is, perhaps, because I'd prefer to see something new, rather than a new representation of a story with which I'm familiar.

So, what makes director RaMell Ross' adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Nickel Boys" - a book that I loved - special is that it is something new. The basic concepts and characters of the novel remain intact, but Ross - who was best known up until now for the documentary "Hale County This Morning This Evening" - has taken an experimental approach to the material.

"Nickel Boys," the film, still tells the story of Elwood and Turner - two young Black men who suffer at the hands of the staff of a horrific reformatory school in Florida during the early 1960s - but the picture adopts the concept of seeing the world through someone else's eyes. The film has a first-person point-of-view format in which the audience is literally seeing through the eyes of either character at any given time - therefore, other characters address the camera when speaking to them, and so on.

This approach can be a little disconcerting, at first, but it also allows for a fair amount of compelling experimentation. Rather than going step-by-step through Whitehead's story - although it does follow it pretty faithfully - the film gives us snippets of what the two young men experience; just enough so that we can tell what's going on, but allowing the audience to fill in some of the story themselves.

Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a book-smart young man from Tallahassee, unfairly gets into trouble after he hitches a ride to college with the wrong man, a convict of some sorts, and winds up getting sent to the Nickel Academy. There, he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), whose reason for being there is a little more nebulous. Elwood not only suffers from the mistreatment of the horrible men who run the place - especially Spencer (Hamish Linklater) - but also from other boys being held there.

Throughout the course of the story, which takes place from the early to late 1960s, we seen scenes from later years in one of the young men's lives, at times in the 1980s and possibly later. For reasons that those who've read the book will understand, we only see this character from behind. Some years later, he is still trying to process what happened to him at Nickel Academy, especially as the academy pops up in the news once bodies of some of the young men who were kept there are unearthed.

Due to the time in which it is mostly set, the story is interspersed with imagery from that era - the space race and shots of Martin Luther King Jr. giving speeches. But the film also takes an experimental approach, occasionally showing images - a few of which border on surreal - that aim to capture the essence of the Black experience in America. Most of these images are not familiar, but add to the film's occasional free-floating mood of melancholy.

This is not a film that will guide you step by step. There are scenes where, if you blink, you might miss what happened to a particular character. I was only able to fill in the blanks because I've read the book. Therefore, "Nickel Boys" is a film that involves active participation, and those who are willing to take on a challenge will be rewarded. 

This is an often devastating, frequently moving film about the struggle against societal bigotry, but it's also about perseverance, survival, and writing wrongs. For fans of the book, the film might not be the film version they'd expect, but it's a unique - and, ultimately, effective - approach to this story. I'd highly recommend it.