Nickel Boys (world premiere in the presence of RaMell Ross)

RaMell Ross: Nickel Boys (US 2024).

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Made possible by a donation from Alan & Caroline McConnell.

Viewed at Galaxy, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 31 Aug 2024.

In person: RaMell Ross, Ethan Herisse, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Brandon Wilson.

Robert Daniels (TFF 2024): "A stirring follow-up to his directorial debut HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING, RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a biting, visually adventurous coming-of-age story set in Jim Crow-era Florida. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is an idealistic Black high schooler whose aims of attending college are upended when racist law officials falsely accuse and then convict him of a crime, pulling him away from the loving arms of his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). At Nickel Academy, an abusive reformatory school, Elwood befriends a world-weary Turner (Brandon Wilson). Arrestingly gorgeous and daringly immersive, Ross effortlessly switches decades—the story spans the 1960s to the 2010s and changes perspectives. As it swims through memories, traumas, friendships, archival footage, and moments of defiance, Ross’ film offers a radical gaze at the perils of Black boyhood." –Robert Daniels (U.S., 2024, 140 min)

AA: RaMell Ross has created an experimental film based on the Pulitzer-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. "The story takes place in Jim Crow era Tallahassee, Florida. It is about the ordeal of the young African-American Elwood Curtis who is falsely accused by the police of being an accomplice in a car theft. He is sent to a segregated reform school called Nickel Academy. There he forms a close friendship with a boy named Turner as they try to survive the abuse by the school and its corrupt administrators" (from the admirably concise premise in Wikipedia). 

The narration is highly elliptical. More than story-driven, Nickel Boys is image-driven, based on an approach of the immediate experience. It is largely conveyed in a subjective camera point-of-view, made famous in Hollywood by Lady in the Lake but introduced in Somewhere in the Night, also imagined by Orson Welles in his unrealized Heart of Darkness plan, but the first major instance may have been The Man with the Movie Camera.

The unique and striking insight of RaMell Ross in his subjective camera approach is to portray how it is to be looked at as a person of colour. "Race is this really bizarre thing, and it's a dominant, meaning-making social construct. I wanted to cinematically iterate the experience of being a person of colour" (RaMell Ross in conversation with Robert Daniels, in Film Watch 2024, the Telluride Film Festival magazine).

The achievement is extraordinary. Although the duration is 140 minutes, there is a feeling that each shot is special. The ratio is Academy. There are oblique angles, sideways angles, gratuitous angles, ultrasound images, point-of-view shots of a baby, reflections in an iron, flipbooks, archival inserts, vintage television footage. The general experience resembles a fever dream. We approach altered states of consciousness. RaMell Ross enters the cinema as a visual inventor. One of his most memorable compositions is an extreme high angle overhead reversed two-shot of Elwood and Turner.

Ethan Herisse as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner are great, but the heart of the movie belongs to Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Hattie, Elwood's grandmother.

The soundscape is as revolutionary as the visual universe. It is an essential element of the stream of consciousness, sometimes alarmistic, sometimes hypersensitive, sometimes evoking ADHD.

From extreme subjectivity the film opens to the big wide world.  The times they are a-changing. We are aware of the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Age. The vision expands to the cosmic in a view of the night sky. The end credits are based on the aesthetics of the flicker film.

The visual world is unusual yet not gratuitous. The experience is so formidable that I need time to digest - and revisit this remarkable movie.