Destined to be the most talked about movie at the 47th Denver Film Festival — if not the 2024 award season — Nickel Boys is a textbook example of how the telling of a story can sometimes be more significant than the story itself.
The story, you probably already know. Directed by RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a brutal reform school, Nickel Academy, that operated for decades without intervention despite being a cesspool of corruption and racial abuse with a secret graveyard out back. The acts heaped upon the characters are simultaneously horrifying and infuriatingly routine.
At this point in our history, even the most ardent deniers have a difficult time mounting a defense that American history isn’t shaped by systemic segregation, genocide and slavery in its many insidious incarnations.
In another filmmaker’s hands, Nickel Boys might have been the rote recounting of a terrible piece of history that is not too different from now. But in Ross’ hands, Nickel Boys places the audience directly inside the perspective of the movie’s two Black leads: Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson).
Elwood gets the lion’s share of the narrative, which means we see what he sees. For gamers, the herky-jerky image and characters addressing the camera will have a familiar feel. For those used to cinema’s typical omnipotent presence, the first-person device of Nickel Boys might feel limiting, even distracting.
But Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray are so good at the technique that the artifice quickly falls away into an immersive experience that feels truly empathetic. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” Atticus Finch told his daughter in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. “Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
And in Nickel Boys, the color of that skin is the whole story.
ON SCREEN: Nickel Boys screens at 3:15 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 2, at AMC 9+CO 10 with director RaMell Ross in attendance. Ross will receive the 2024 Excellence in Directing Award and participate in a post-screening conversation.