The bold experiment ultimately doesn’t quite pay off in Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel struggling to find a way of dealing with Whitehead’s fancy plot reveal towards its end – someone isn’t who we thought they were.
Whitehead’s book tells the story of a poor black youth in 1960s America whose application and natural academic gifts suggest he’s going to have more life choices than the general run of his peers. And then, a complete chance puts him in the wrong place at the wrong time and instead of going off to college, Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp as a young boy, Ethan Herisse when older) winds up in the Nickel Academy, a school of particularly hard knocks.
There, two systems obtain. The white boys get an education (and a fair chunk of the black boys’ food ration). The black boys, living segregated lives, get loaned out to local white people to do drudge work – slavery, in effect. The Academy is run by the strict disciplinarian Mr Spencer (Hamish Linklater, impressively nasty). He leaves the doling out of black-boy misery to his too-enthusiastic lieutenant Mr Blakeley (Gralen Bryant Banks, also impressive). In the wider world this is the era when Martin Luther King was making headway. But the Academy has little to offer black youth other than injustice. Offering little and demanding much, there’s not much in the way of compensation, apart from the odd friendship. It’s a tough life.
Director RaMell Ross tells his story through a first-person point of view, as if we, or the camera, were Elwood. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake famously did this in 1947. The Humphrey Bogart film Dark Passage did something similar, also in 1947. But there is a more recent comparator – László Nemes’s Son of Saul from 2015, a grim tale of life inside a concentration camp through one man’s eyes.
At around the 40-minute mark we get a second point of view, once Turner (Brandon Wilson) arrives in Elwood’s life, and a firm friendship is established.
The decision to shoot a point-of-view narrative is done for a very good reason. It’s a way of dealing with Whitehead’s shock plot turn. But it has the effect of inadvertently draining the film of much of its drama – if you’re watching the technique are you really watching the film?
Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray have also taken the odd decision to make everything look pretty, which takes the bite out of Whitehead’s detailing of the awfulness of the regime at the Nickel Academy. We’re told the black boys don’t get decent food and are punished brutally for any infringement of the rules, yet things at the Academy don’t look too bad. They look almost as peachy as Elwood’s cosy life back with his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), or in the schoolroom in his early years being encouraged by inspirational teacher Mr Hill (Jimmie Fails, an actor on the rise).
Against these caveats, there is good stuff in here, particularly a scene towards the end when all the point-of-view chickens come home to roost – I can say no more than that but it is beautifully handled by RaMell. And there are the performances of Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, with Wilson almost edging the number-one-billed Herisse out of the picture.
The film got an Oscar nomination, and seems to have almost universally positive reviews on rottentomatoes. Not me. I liked aspects of it but didn’t think it really cohered. For all it’s many pluses, Nickel Boys is a movie too at odds with itself to hit home.
Nickel Boys – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
