‘Nickel Boys’ review: Paean to lives of reform-school kids

The 2012 discovery of a mass unmarked grave on the grounds of the Florida School for Boys was the sort of headline that short-circuits the brain. Archeologists estimate that nearly 100 kids died from violence and neglect over the juvenile reformatory’s century in use. How can anyone process that scale of buried grief?

Author Colson Whitehead funneled that sorrow into “The Nickel Boys,” a 2019 novel about two Black friends at the lightly fictionalized Nickel Academy, and unearthed emotions so beautiful that he won a Pulitzer Prize. A straight adaption would pack power, but it’s even better that the book came into the hands of a true humanist like RaMell Ross. Making his feature debut, the director not only turns anonymous bones into people, he turns his people into the camera: The audience sees the world literally through the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). We couldn’t be hugged any tighter to their point of view.

Ross describes his visual style as a tribute to the “epic banal.” Small moments — a spaghetti dinner, a smiling girl, a scattering of Christmas tinsel — are shot by the cinematographer Jomo Fray with such grandeur that they become important. He’s already made a documentary with the technique, the Oscar-nominated “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” set in Alabama. The goal isn’t just to prove that the ordinary world is surrounded by beauty; it’s that his characters are active observers of it, too.

This shouldn’t seem like a radical act except that Ross uses the technique to immortalize the days of Black Americans in the South whose lives are more often looked at than through. Outsiders tend to cram people into a box, force them to fit a message that ranges from exploitative to tediously well-meaning. Ross sets them free. The message is simply that Elwood and Turner are human beings.

The script, co-written by Ross and producer Joslyn Barnes, scraps Whitehead’s opening prologue about the wretched cemetery to instead emphasize that this will be a bittersweet celebration of life. Elwood, growing up in racially riven Tallahassee during the 1960s, is introduced first. The glimpses of his world from a child (played by Ethan Cole Sharp) to a high school student flicker by with no sense of urgency, which is exactly how it should be for a boy who has no reason to suspect his freedom is about to be taken away. He’s smart — perhaps not as bright and sensitive and idealistic as he is in Whitehead’s novel, but making him more of an everyman seems to be on purpose. (Ross has even dropped the “The” from the title.)

It’s possible to read Whitehead’s book and think, “How could these horrors happen to such a good kid?” Ross instead wants us to ask, “How could this happen to anyone?” including the school’s bullies and white boys who live in a segregated part of the campus and seem to be getting preferential treatment. To be accurate, the white students were victims, too. Later on, both groups of students joined forces on a blog that gathered enough stories of abuse, a website that’s referenced when the film leaps a few decades into the future. But “Nickel Boys” is also kind to those who can’t confront their memories, even in its camerawork which refuses to record the cruelty — it’s implied, never shown. Sometimes, to endure, you swallow all the bad things and hold them inside.

Things go awry when Elwood, nearly 17, hitches a ride in the wrong car. He doesn’t know he’s getting into a stolen Plymouth and can’t fathom how this one choice will derail his future even if we could warn him what’s coming. But Ross knows that this road will lead Elwood straight to Nickel Academy, so he extends this moment into an agonizing gag in which the driver (the late Taraja Ramsess) fiddles with figuring out how to unlock the passenger door. It’s not something you’re aware of on the first watch. You spot it on the second. Like Elwood, we start naive and only later recognize the danger.

The idea that Nickel Academy is a school by any definition of the word is a bleak joke. The kids are essentially enslaved to work the fields or run illegal errands under the supervision of an employee named Harper (Fred Hechinger). It’s gut-wrenching that this tragedy is happening in the moment when Martin Luther King Jr. is leading a Civil Rights revolution not too far away. It’s worse that the school stayed open until 2011, when it was closed for “budgetary limitations.”

Elwood is written to be so watchful that it’s hard to feel like you know the character at all — he’s almost too universal. His individuality comes across best when we see him the way his classmate Turner does, chin-tucked, eyes learning to be wary. Elwood believes in MLK’s optimism for America. “It’s against the law!” he protests to Turner, the sly and funny cynic, who can’t imagine things ever improving. Elwood is convinced he can surmount obstacles; Turner is resigned to going around them. The two debate but don’t always seem to hear each other. As we take turns being inside of them, it’s up to you which one you trust.

Periodically, Ross and his editor Nicholas Monsour cut to old black and white TV images of NASA rockets attempting to beam data back to Earth. The motif doesn’t totally make sense. Is it a comment on the country’s priorities? An example of looking up rather than around? Is it just a neat way to take a breather from all the awful stuff happening under the trees? Eventually, I settled on imagining these transitions as an echo of Alex Somers and Scott Alario’s fantastic rough-hewn score with its fuzzy notes that sound as though they’re getting pinged back and forth between satellites, deteriorating as they travel through time, uncertain if their pleas will be heard.

Ross likes to feel, not tell. There are images of students teetering on stilts, of kids who look too small to be there playing with toy soldiers in a puddle of milk. After Elwood and Turner suffer permanent blows, the camera leaps out of their bodies and hovers behind their heads, particularly as the one we stay with as an adult, played by Daveed Diggs, attempts to grow into a full person. Disassociation never looked so lovely. At its most soul-stirring, the film becomes a mood piece. There’s a five-and-a-half minute montage set to “Tezeta,” a jazz track by the Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke, that would be mesmerizing at twice the length.

As good as the movie is with its visuals, it’s just as skillful with sound. In the first shot, Elwood lies in the yard looking up and when he turns his head, you can hear blades of grass tickle the back of your neck. Later, there’s a buzz — a bee? A fly? — that, as the crimes multiply, shifts into a continual hum, a plague upon the brain.

The only ding on the film is that Ross is still learning to work with actors. He’s fine when his background characters are just palling around the lunchroom, but the POV approach is hard on his leads, even talents like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother. When there is dialogue — which, thankfully, isn’t all the time — it’s in the form of one person staring into the lens and waiting for their turn to speak. The really clunky moments come off like an audition tape in which the off-camera casting assistant running lines is late on their cues.

The one great conversation scene comes when Diggs sits across a bar from a fellow Nickel alumni, played by Craig Tate in a phenomenal cameo where his nervous twitches show us the broken boy inside the man. Now old, the two survivors are siloed in their grief — alive and lucky, sure, but still entombed. They’re so damaged that they can’t, or won’t, really connect about what they went through. It’s too hard to see past their own trauma, but Ross has shown us how they once simply saw themselves as teenagers, with the promise of a better future ahead. We remember. We saw it, too.