By Neil Giordano

Nickel Boys is an unsettling, yet gorgeous, cinematic adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel.

Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross. Screening at AMC Boston Common, Kendall Cinema, and Coolidge Corner Theater.

Brandon Wilson and Ethan Harisse in a scene from Nickel Boys.

About a decade ago, investigators began exposing the horrific criminal misdeeds of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reform school that operated in the Florida panhandle up until 2011. Past students recounted long-suppressed stories of physical and sexual violence and persecution. As bodies began to be exhumed from unmarked graves, most of them African-American young men, another shameful chapter in America’s past was uncovered. This event inspired Colson Whitehead’s fictionalized version of his 2019 Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys. The book has now been given an unsettling, yet gorgeous, cinematic adaptation via director RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys (minus the “The”).

The narrative, a rich and contradictory fusion of theme and style, is set in the early ’60s and interweaves episodes of racial injustice with a study in male friendship. At the center of the action are two young men at the fictional Nickel Academy, Elwood and Turner. Before his time at the school, Elwood (Ethan Harisse) had lived an exemplary life. An exceptional student, hard-working and cerebral, he believes in an American meritocracy in which justice comes to those who deserve it. He is inspired by a teacher to become active in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. His mother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and others forecast a great future for him. Elwood is literally on his way to college when he is blindsided by a chance encounter that lands him at the ill-fated Nickel Academy. There he befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), whose guarded and disconsolate personality probably reflects his time as a repeat visitor at Nickel. Turner is at first bemused by Elwood’s idealism, but grows to feel for him. And feel with him. Both actors inhabit their roles with grace and complexity, giving the characters’ trials and tribulations powerful emotional resonance.

The movie’s assets, however, go well beyond its storyline. Director Ross and his creative team have made the narrative compellingly cinematic in various ways.. Ross previously impressed audiences with his documentary Hale County, This Morning This Evening, an impressionistic vision of contemporary Black life in Alabama. This unconventional documentary was a montage of sounds and images and Nickel Boys draws on some of the same techniques, most noticeably in its opening scenes. Jumbled and messy images of nature and humanity are juxtaposed with an enticing soundscape that features human voices and birds and cars, through which we are given access to the first-person point-of-view of a young Elwood: ruminative, questioning, absorbing the world around him in bits and pieces. The sequence is reminiscent of the dreamy style of Terrence Malick; RaMell Ross projects on the screen a transcendental mind map of a character’s inner thoughts. This first-person POV continues — in slightly less abstract form — during most of the film’s early sections. The camera sketches a subjective view of Elwood’s world until his first day at Nickel, where he meets Turner across a dining hall table. Then the film resets — and the camera resets. We find ourselves looking from Turner’s perspective as he regards Elwood across the table. Juxtaposing these two subjective perspectives gives viewers the privilege of understanding these two young men more deeply, how they read each other as well as the world around them, particularly Nickel. A few moments provide fourth-wall-breaking shots of each man looking straight at the other, into the camera lens, reminiscent of a Barry Jenkins trademark shot (this may be no coincidence, since Jenkins, another masterfully poetic Black filmmaker, adapted Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad for the screen).

Captivating as this style is, it could not be used throughout the entire film. At times, I was worried Nickel Boys would sacrifice narrative coherence on the altar of aesthetic bliss. But,thankfully, the film settles into something slightly more familiar by its midpoint, supplying shot/reverse-shot sequences that prod the story along. As in Whitehead’s novel, there are only indirect or in brief glimpses of Nickel Academy’s brutality, inspired by the insouciant barbarism of its headmaster (a fiendish Hamish Linklater). Some might see this indirectness as a flaw because it downplays the school’s whippings and use of cruelty as a form of discipline. Yet there are other indignities at Nickel, that we are shown directly, that have an equal horror. For example, the sorry state of the Academy’s “school” is brutal, particularly for a student of Elwood’s intelligence: he is continually in search of something to feed his mind. The school also sells most of the food and supplies that were earmarked for Black students; this is yet another American institution that milks private profit from social and racial misery.

Additional narrative complexity is supplied by repeated flash-forwards, a tricky technique carried over from the novel that fractures the ’60s narrative for the sake of connecting the past with the present-day. An adult Elwood runs a moving company in New York City; he finds himself reluctantly grappling with an ongoing investigation into Nickel’s past. Survivors of the school are organizing online, and Elwood feels conflicted. The trauma may be too painful for him to confront. The film dramatizes Elwood’s agony from his perspective — the character is shot from behind only, his face hidden by camera angles and his dreadlocks. But the approach also offers a clue to a plot twist that’s revealed in the film’s final act. I was worried that those who hadn’t read the novel might be left scratching their heads. But making viewers work to make sense of what’s going on is Nickel Boys‘ strong suit. The effort will be rewarded: the film offers a deeply compassionate vision of Black masculinity and friendship — a bond formed after confronting a terrible reality — that resonates with a fierce tragic power.

Neil Giordano teaches film and creative writing in Newton. His work as an editor, writer, and photographer has appeared in Harper’s, Newsday, Literal Mind, and other publications. Giordano previously was on the original editorial staff of DoubleTake magazine and taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.