Nickel Boys is an artistically daring masterpiece

RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel uses a point-of-view camera to fully immerse audiences

Where does history live? In documents, artefacts, bones? Or in memory, that fragile, boundless state we try to express in fragments, in talk or on the page, but ultimately take to our graves? It’s the question that shapes RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, a more artistically daring literary adaptation than almost any other of its peers. His film is a feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience’s souls.

What it isn’t is a mere translation to the screen of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys – it’s testament to why and how we tell stories about the past and its traumas. Whitehead’s book is a fictionalised account of a friendship forged by two Black students at Nickel Academy, a so-called “reform school”, a euphemistic turn of phrase used to describe a juvenile penal institution. It’s a storyteller’s effort to approximate memory in the face of the monstrous weight of fact: in 2012, a mass, unmarked grave was uncovered on the grounds of the Florida School of Boys, containing 55 identifiable burials, with evidence of a documented 100 deaths at the school.

Each is a story now lost to memory. Nickel Boys honours them through the twin figures of Elwood (Ethan Herisse, with Ethan Cole Sharp as his younger iteration) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who view their fates under very different lights. Elwood, who we’re introduced to first, grew up in a world tinted by optimism – amid talk of the march from Selma to Montgomery, with Martin Luther King Jr at its head; television footage of the Apollo space programme; and the promise by a teacher that, at the HBCU Elwood is set to attend, there are textbooks without racial epithets to cross out. Turner, meanwhile, was moulded by a harsher reality, as hinted by a choppy montage of an open boxcar speeding across the landscape. We’re offered no evidence of home.

But the preciousness of their friendship, in the face of it all, reaches a kind of revelatory crescendo in the scene where Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, a luminous beacon of hope), arrives at the Academy to see him. They’ve hidden him away from her. Come up with flimsy excuses about why he can’t accept visitors. But she finds Turner, this boy like him and entirely unlike him, finds out they’re friends, and embraces him anyway. Elwood and Turner carry pieces of each other with them.

Nickel Boys’s committed use of POV is about more than simple identification. It’s a total surrender to the subjective experience – as beautiful here as in Ross’s earlier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) – in which we’re allowed to piece together its narrative from observed detail. Bruises and scars on a woman’s knee speaks to the pain she may hide from us; the calculated, habitual way a man removes a set of rings from his fingers signals a terrible act that’s about to take place.

POV: Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson in ‘Nickel Boys’ (Curzon)

It’s a kind of internal detective work reflected on screen, before the film suddenly flashes forward to an older Elwood (Daveed Diggs), as he tries to make peace between his memories and the incoming news that mass graves have been discovered at Nickel. Violence, in Nickel Boys, isn’t presented in the uncompromising way other filmmakers have argued for, but as fractured, disassociated – the way the mind might allow it to replay. It’s here the camera briefly lifts out of its POV, so it can hover at the back of a character’s head. What do those memories mean to him? To us?

At one point, he bumps into another former student, while drinking at a bar. He seems reluctant to corroborate Elwood’s stories, to talk about what happened. “I don’t know what more you want me to remember,” he snaps back. Yes, history lives in memory. But Nickel Boys asks us to consider, too, the burden of it.

Dir: RaMell Ross. Starring: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Cert 12A, 140 mins.

‘Nickel Boys’ is in cinemas from 3 January