'Nickel Boys' Is a Game-Changing Look at Anti-Black Violence

The first time we clearly see Elwood (Ethan Herisse), the high school-aged protagonist of the Golden Globe-nominated Nickel Boys, it’s jarring. The moment happens about a third of the way through the film, which is an adaption of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Up until that point, Nickel Boys is shot entirely from Elwood’s perspective—a first-person, point-of-view journey through the young man’s life growing up in the Jim Crow South.

The reveal signals a shift in the story’s tone from coming-of-age tale to horror story. Elwood is a promising student who, after hitching a ride from a stranger to his first day of college, finds himself in trouble with the law and shipped off to the abusive Florida “reform” school that gives the story its name. There, he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), a fellow student who, having been at Nickel longer, is already far more jaded than the naïve Elwood.

At first, Nickel could be mistaken for any other boarding school: the kids goof off in class and trade secrets about how to deal with certain teachers. On his first full day, Elwood is teased by a group of classic schoolyard bullies. Later, he stumbles into the middle of a fight and must decide whether to intervene or turn the other way. But the horror quickly creeps in. Nickel’s campus is segregated, with the white students getting the better accommodations. While they use their free time to toss around a football, the Black students pick oranges off trees and reupholster the school’s crumbling infrastructure. Nickel’s teachers aren’t just bad, they’re terrifying—like the skinny tie-sporting school administrator Spencer (Hamish Linklater), who bounds around campus chain-smoking and preaching the gospel of hard work (which, at Nickel, amounts to slave labor). And that’s when he’s not escorting misbehaving students to a mysterious, dingy “white house” where they’ll be whipped so hard that they end up in the infirmary.

Ross grounds these more sordid elements in reality, splicing in archival footage to situate the senseless violence signature to Nickel within a wider history of racial injustice. When Elwood finds himself facing off with Spencer in the white house, a slideshow of images of the real-life students of Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where close to 100 boys died between 1900 and 1973 and on which the film is based, flips by, one after another, in perfect step with the sound of the lashes being administered to Elwood’s bare back. It’s a clever way to pan away from the abject violence already conjured in our minds—and a reminder that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

None of this would resonate without a strong cast to carry the overwhelming weight of the story, and Ross has thankfully found two ideal muses in Herisse and Wilson. As Elwood, Herisse burrows deep into the character’s timid innocence; his belief in the power of activism to effect change is embodied through Herisse’s exactingly proper manner of speech and his almost impenetrable idealism, making the gradual crushing of his quixotic worldview all the more devastating. By contrast, Wilson injects his character with a resolute rebelliousness. Turner is jaded and worn, the product of a system that has chewed him up and spit him back out again and again, and Wilson taps into a wiry cynicism that bridges the gap between maddening nihilism and the dishearteningly stark realism the film depicts.

The pair are surrounded by an equally talented supporting cast. Jimmie Fails makes ample use of limited screentime, adding a much-needed dose of warmth as the teacher who first recognizes Elwood’s potential, while Gladiator II’s Fred Hechinger, as a young Nickel employee, toes a razor-thin line between helpful and menacing as he takes Elwood and Turner off-campus for a variety of odd jobs. But it’s Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor who leaves the largest imprint. Playing Hattie, Elwood’s doting grandmother, the Oscar nominee (who also starred in this year’s Exhibiting Forgiveness) concretizes the searing pain of a caregiver pushed into accepting that all hope may be lost. In one of the film’s most moving sequences, Hattie tries to visit Elwood, only to be told she can’t see him because he’s in the infirmary with injuries from a beating. The cruel irony of Elwood being denied visitation because he’s been incapacitated by the very institution that’s imprisoned him isn’t lost—and Ellis-Taylor’s face tells a whole story in itself.

Overall, the approach to Nickel Boys is an ambitious directorial choice for Ross, who earned a 2019 Oscar nomination for his breakout project, Hale County This Morning, This Evening. In that documentary, Ross examined the daily lives of Black people living and surviving in the titular rural Alabama Black Belt vicinity. His mission, as he’s explained, was to find something meaningful and profound in the mundane happenings of his subjects—a concept he refers to as the “epic-banal.” With Nickel Boys, he expands on his documentarian instincts, bringing a similarly progress-oriented, integrity-bound value system to a story so unsettingly harrowing that facing it head-on might otherwise feel like torture.

Hollywood has long wrestled with how to portray Black trauma. While films like 12 Years a Slave and Till are undoubtedly vital, the unflinching manner in which they depict brutal violence against Black bodies can sometimes drip over into torture porn, begging the question of whether this form of historically accurate “representation” is, ironically enough, exploitative to the very community it aims to humanize. One could wonder the same about Nickel Boys, a film whose skeletons aren’t hidden in the closet but rather sprawled out prominently among a sea of unmarked graves awaiting future excavation. Ross has acknowledged as much himself, writing, “A look over yesteryear’s horizon reveals photography and film as the technology of racism.” But, as he goes on to ask, if “a cul-de-sac history of exploitation is held in Black skin…how do you attend to a problem that is the visualization of itself?”

Nickel Boys provides an answer to that question. By placing us directly within the characters’ lines of sight, Ross eliminates the risk of an alienating remove while also sparing us voyeuristic renderings of historical violence. It’s a novel approach with a profound impact. The gambit pays off in dividends—all the way through to its final, brain-melting reveal.

Nickel Boys is now playing in select theaters.