Torture, Survivorship, and the Lens of Youth

On RaMell Ross' 'Nickel Boys'

RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys, 2024

Continuing our tour of the Oscars Best Picture nominees, Felipe Cabrera — who writes the “Manic Pixie Macho Dream Boy” Substack — reviews Nickel Boys, an adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel. If you enjoy what TMR is producing, please consider pledging $50 a year or $5 a month.

-The Editors

Nickel Boys is the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), a pair of black youth, one idealistic, the other cynical, who are snatched from their families and placed into a juvenile reformatory where students are routinely tortured. The story is a fiction based on the real Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida where violent crimes against students were regularly committed — and with students suffering many of the exact same tortures that were perpetrated on their ancestors by white hands. Nickel Boys is set in Jim Crow Florida in the 1960s, and partially in the 2010s, where one of the characters revisits his trauma through news articles online. Like the novel on which it is based, the film is well done. The visuals are pretty and it is worth streaming. It is a hard task to confront brutal history and shape it into something truthful yet palatable, let alone entertaining.

Much of the plot focuses on Elwood, an adolescent encouraged to attend a nearby college by his teacher mentor — a former Freedom Rider struck by Elwood’s intelligence. The two are simpatico: it is clear that he inspires Elwood and feeds his idealistic nature. Elwood hitches a ride on his way to college. When a police officer pulls the car over, both Elwood and the audience discover together that the car is stolen. Unjustly punished for being in the wrong place, Elwood is sent to juvenile detention at Nickel Academy.

This is where Elwood meets Jack Turner, played charismatically by Brandon Wilson, who sticks up for him when he is taunted. At Nickel, adolescents are sent to the “White House” for punishment. Elwood is beaten so badly there that he spends days in the hospital. Via a combination of regular humiliations, beatings, and growing fatalism, Elwood’s belief that things will improve, that he will get out of Nickel, that African Americans will one day be treated all right (let alone well) in a white world, gradually withers.

In Colson Whitehead’s novel, on which the film is based, Elwood’s idealism is communicated to him through his Nana and much is made of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech he has on vinyl that he listens to and finds comfort in. Elwood believes that his Nana’s lawyer will get him out of this earthly hell. He believes that the system will help him somehow, and he is wrong. Later we discover that the lawyer has robbed his Nana; and Elwood is severely punished for keeping notes of the goings-on at Nickel with the hope of passing it to a journalist for an investigative article.

The message Nickel Boys communicated to me has to do with the pain of having faith in something only for it to be continually defeated, only to be told to wait, to “turn the other cheek” amid horrific treatment. This movie makes what I conceive of as black cynicism or fatalism to be very comprehensible. Elwood’s life is first ruined then extinguished by the system he believes will eventually change. Years later, in the 2010s, we see Turner approached in a Harlem bar by a fellow survivor of the school, who has sought relief for his trauma in substance use. He has the glassy-eyed stupor of an addict, and Turner, who has started a successful moving company, is left unsure of what to say when his former classmate asks him for a job. The same trauma experienced by two different people can destroy one and only wound the other. There is no morality to this logic. We pity the addict. We feel for adult Turner (Daveed Diggs) when he scans the internet for news about Nickel.

In one of the movie’s final scenes, it is revealed that Elwood does not live to see adulthood, but is shot down by a white school employee as he attempts to flee Nickel. So all the POV shots from the dreadlocked character we assume throughout the film to be Elwood are actually Turner. After his eventual escape, Turner takes his friend’s name as a tribute.

Nickel Boys can mean different things to different people. It is a tragic story of black youth destroyed by the systematic oppression of the United States government and its citizens. On the level of pure story, it is a moving tale of friendship and trauma and the horrors of racism. It is also interesting from a technical point of view, shot by handheld camera. The last Oscar-worthy movie shot so unconventionally is, for me, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood.

The camerawork is jarring at times, especially when the POV changes its lateral axis (turns sideways) and when montages and historical films are spliced in (almost always for the sake of an on-the-nose thematic reveal later in the film). Director RaMell Ross uses the device in triple effect: channeling the wonder of youth, the horrors of state-sponsored violence, and the plot-thickening character reveal. The film’s cinematography seems to be strongly influenced by Terrence Malick. But where Malick’s work can feel a little perfume ad-y, with the camera just dancing around Natalie Portman’s head in Song to Song, Ross’ handling of difficult subject matter with Malick’s techniques makes Malick’s work feel shallow by comparison. Don’t get me wrong, I like Malick and Tree of Life is a masterpiece. But after watching Ross’ feature film debut, I can’t help but revise my appreciation of Malick somewhat: the camerawork here feels more thematic and purposeful here than it does in some of the weaker Malick films.

The second half of the movie hinges on the boxing match scene, where Clayton Smith, a black fighter, fails to throw the fight against a student representing the white contingent of the school (Nickel Academy is segregated). The annual match is a major event for the school with a lot of money on the line. Tasked with going down in the second round, Clayton miscounts rounds and winds up winning the fight by decision. He screams apologies at a cigar-chomping superintendent (Hamish Linklater) after the fight but is later murdered and buried on the school’s grounds.

A chief weakness of Nickel Boys, for me, is the stakes in the boxing scene, one of the most consequential in the book. The problem is that the gravity of the situation is not properly communicated. The camera pans around the faces of the audience, with Elwood and Turner putting two and two together that Clayton might win the fight and be punished, but what’s missing is the sheer thrill of the fight itself — the film seems to be afraid of being caught promoting student-on-student fighting. It is an important sequence, where multiple throughlines of the film come together, but the cinematic implementation feels insufficient to the danger at hand for Clayton.

Missteps aside, I finished the film with a deep sense of gratitude, an appreciation for how it is possible for those who have experienced immense trauma to move forward in their lives. In Turner, I see a survivor, albeit a damaged one (who can live through such things and not carry scars?), who has somehow managed to piece together a life. He has a loving partner. A furniture moving business. A life that is by no means easy but worthwhile. All he can do is continue on and honor his friend.

Felipe Cabrera is an MFA dropout from Naperville, Illinois. He cut his teeth as a fact-checker during the BuzzFeed era and is currently at work on renewing his Brazilian citizenship in the event that America gets too great. You can check out his cultural journalism and occasional fiction at Manic Pixie Macho Dream Boy.