When we talk about movies, we talk about what they’re about. But when we talk about Nickel Boys, we have to talk about how it’s about what it’s about.
“The intention is to be inside the perspective — inside the worldview of these folks,” says RaMell Ross, director and co-screenwriter of Nickel Boys. “It’s less about iterating the world and more about how you see it.”
Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Nickel Boys employs a distinct style you’re not likely to find in other movies: shot from the characters’ point of view.
“It was the first idea I had right after reading the book,” Ross says. “Plan B [the production company], fortunately, gave me open imagination space.”
That open space was to film Nickel Boys in the same first-person style Ross employed in his debut feature, the 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening.
“Because form is content,” Ross explains, adding that Whitehead’s narrative was a perfect fit for his meta-film approach. “How else can we work with this drama, this drama-trauma narrative? It needs to be told, but how?”
American nightmare
The how is what makes Nickel Boys sing. Starring Ethan Herisse as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner, the movie, like the book, uses fiction to explore the harrowing truths of a real segregated Florida reform school governed by racialized abuse and murder in the 1960s. But unlike the book — Whitehead employs a third-person perspective — Ross immerses the viewer by placing them inside the main character’s point of view.
That choice has elicited a wide range of responses.
Ross says men have come up to him after seeing the movie, moved because “They’ve never known what it’s like to look through another person’s eyes, let alone be looked at like they were a person of color.” And for audiences of color, Nickel Boys can dredge up “old trauma from their past.” Or, as two women told Ross: “This is the Black mother’s worst nightmare.”
But Nickel Boys also captures a national nightmare, which Ross underlines by incorporating “authentic and reality-based” source material. “Having the film sort of fluctuate between traditional drama and modes of documentary — or modes of our relating to truth.”
For Ross, Nickel Boys is neither nonfiction or fiction, in the traditional sense, but a chance to wonder: “Can you truly scale real-life and fantasy in a way that human beings do in their brains?”
‘An encounter with Black life’
And it’s working. I caught up with Ross in November at the Denver Film Festival (where he received the fest’s Excellence in Directing Award) in the middle of a whirlwind tour that began with the movie’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in September. That tour is far from over, as Ross received Best Director and Wilson won Breakthrough Actor at the 2024 Gotham Awards — an indication of future awards and accolades to come, and an acknowledgment that what Ross captures in Nickel Boys isn’t just artistic, it’s accessible.
“I grew up watching all pop culture things,” he says. “My original sensibility is The Lion King, Jurassic Park — all of the classics from Goonies to Fight Club.
“I think that’s why, while making art, I’m always insistent on trying to cross the line into it being palatable for a large amount of people,” he continues. “I’m not content with just making an art film and having it go out to the art world. I want it to feel as grand in scope as some of those classics that can hold people’s attention and are markers in their lives.”
Ross hopes that by tapping into that same space, the mental real estate so many beloved movies live in, Nickel Boys could accomplish something remarkable.
“I think if you can do that in the context of Black life — if you can create an experience of an encounter with Black life — then I think it could change the world,” Ross says. “Because it’s equally as powerful as running in the rain.”
ON SCREEN: Nickel Boys is now playing in limited release.