Colson Whitehead has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, putting him up there with only Faulkner, Updike and Booth Tarkington in the most rarefied rank of American novelists. The immensely evocative Nickel Boys is the film version of the second book, a bruising, lyrically told story of institutional abuse, prison corruption and survival that Whitehead was inspired to write when grave sites were discovered in Marianne, Florida – more and more bodies, from 2012 onwards – on the grounds of an infamous establishment, the Dozier School for Boys.
The film concentrates, by and large, on the Jim Crow era in that state, pivoting at one fateful juncture in the story, when new friends Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson) meet across a cafeteria table at what Whitehead chose to fictionalise as the “Nickel Academy”. Until that point, our perspective has belonged wholly to Elwood – unjustly incarcerated there for delinquency after hitching a ride from the wrong person, and kept away for years from the loving embrace of his grandmother Hattie (a staunchly moving Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor).
Indeed, the formal gamble of director RaMell Ross, an Oscar nominee for his 2018 documentary Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, is to shoot the whole story from a first-person viewpoint – we see only what Elwood sees, and then later what Jack sees. This is certainly no first for cinema – they tried it with film noir, in Lady in the Lake (1947) – but it’s a boldly experimental approach for this material, which might have sagged into stodgy awards bait in other hands.
Ross brings it off superbly, thanks in large part to his collaboration with cinematographer Jomo Fray, who surely ought to be a front-runner in that Oscar category this year. Fray uses the frame in an almost sculptural way, with impressionistic vignettes – at the start, the sun glinting between blades of grass – immersing us in the imagination of Elwood as a child. It’s easy to be reminded of Terrence Malick, undoubtedly an influence on Ross; the film doesn’t seem to be honeying these two boys’ memories by way of homage, so much as honouring the specificity of every moment lived. Herisse and Wilson, not newcomers but never tested quite like this, take turns to be seen from the other’s point of view, and excel at the especially tough task of building a tangible rapport while interacting chiefly with the camera.
Abuse and injustice will rip Elwood and Jack away from each other, we know – whether we’ve read the novel or not. But the film sidles up to the narrative’s wrenching twists rather than heavily foreshadowing them, and is all the more gutting for it.
It’s not an in-your-face tract, and doesn’t need to exaggerate a single aspect of what made these reform schools hell – the beatings, the racism, the solitary confinement so long as to stifle all hope. Rightly treating the book as a new American classic, Ross doesn’t try to supplant it so much as do the best possible job of illustrating it: a deference to the source that makes his film a modest triumph.
12A cert, 140 min. In cinemas from Jan 3
