Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine and Joslyn Barnes   Director: RaMell Ross   Screenplay: RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes   Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jimmie Fails, Luke Tennie, Ja’Quan Monroe-Henderson, Trey Perkins, Craig Tate, Bryant Tardie, Gralen Bryant Banks, Bill Martin Williams and Lucy Faust   Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: B-

Your opinion about RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel is likely to depend largely on your reaction to the director’s aesthetic, which some will believe heightens the power of the underlying narrative with dreamlike detail while others will argue it undermines the film’s impact with artsy fussiness.  Viewers will also be split on the radical shifts of perspective Ross, cinematographer Jomo Fray and editor Nicholas Monsour embrace in presenting the narrative, although these can be interpreted as reflecting structural patterns in Whitehead’s book.  “Nickel Boys” is visually an extremely self-conscious piece of work, and if you don’t care for the effect—not unlike, say, the hazy vibe of a picture like David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” (2000), but with chronological shifts and archival commentary added to the mix—you might find that as in that case, the mannered style undermines the emotional resonance rather than enhancing it.

The novel was inspired by the Dozier School for Boys, a Florida juvenile detention facility in Florida established in 1900 that operated for more than a century until revelations of corruption, abuse, deaths and secret graves led to its closure in 2011.  The Nickel School is its fictional twin, and it’s where the teenaged Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) finds himself in the early sixties, wrongly arrested for auto theft. 

But the film doesn’t begin with his confinement.  Instead it starts with an off-kilter, luminous shot of the arm of young Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) reaching toward oranges hanging from a tree against the blue sky as his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) calls him in to supper.  There follows a montage of scenes—a card party, Hattie at work as a maid (at one point laughingly tossing a clean sheet over the boy as he lies on a bed)—accompanied by stills, archival material of the time, gauzy photos, all of which, taken together, suggest an idyllic childhood, though one tinged with the casual racism of the time, shown in a brief scene in which an elderly man (Bill Martin Williams) disgustedly examines young black men on the sidewalk with his cane.

Then Elwood has grown into his teens, and Herisse takes over the role.  But we don’t see his face, because the camera shows us everything from his viewpoint—as in his interaction with the high school teacher (Jimmie Fails) who encourages him and his idealistic entrance into the grassroots levels of the Civil Rights movement. 

Then disaster strikes as Elwood accepts a ride while walking to a community college for some free classes.  The Turquoise Impala is stopped by a patrolman and the driver accused of car theft, and Elwood is assumed to be his accomplice.  His journey to Nickel follows—interrupted by a clip from Stanley Kramer’s “The Defiant Ones.”  It’s a segregated place, where white offenders are treated appreciably better than the black inmates, and Elwood is confronted by a harsh taskmaster in Spencer (Hamish Linklater), who lays out the rules.  Even Spencer’s black aide Blakeley (Gralen Bryant Banks) shows no sympathy for his charges.

Nickel is burdened not only by corrupt administrators, who sell off supplies meant for the “students,” put the boys to work in the compound’s orange grove and brutalize them for supposed infractions, but by bullies like Black Mike (Ja’Quan Monroe-Henderson) and his minions Desmond (Bryant Tardie) and Chickie Pete (Trey Perkins).  In such company Elwood is lucky to find a friend, Jack Turner (Brandon Wise), even if his brash cynicism is in stark contrast to Elwood’s shy optimism.

They meet in the cafeteria, and it’s here that Ross and Fray abruptly change perspective.  For the first time we see Elwood’s face, from Turner’s viewpoint; the introductory conversation we’ve just heard while watching Turner is now repeated with the camera focused on Elwood instead.  But the first-person technique isn’t a permanent thing, as it was in “Lady in the Lake” back in 1946: though the camera shifts from Elwood to Turner and back again, the film also often settles into more conventional straight-on mode, though even at such times it’s likely to interrupt the action with more montages, and even at the most routine moments the operative rule seems to be finding an arty way to visualize things.

That’s true, for example, in a sequence at a private swimming pool where Elwood and Turner have been assigned to do some chores, shot dreamily from the bottom of the pool, or another at a student boxing match where Griff (Luke Tennie), the black fighter in the bout, defies orders and causes Spencer and his cronies to lose heavily on their bets. Here the fighters are shown mostly from the waist-down, emphasizing the footwork.

Within this heavily stylized setting, with its abundantly varied interruptions of dreamlike context, the story hits beats that are actually quite standard.  Hattie tries to visit Elwood, for example, and is turned away repeatedly; her hopes of mounting a legal challenge to the young man’s confinement are dashed by an unscrupulous lawyer.  And Turner and Elwood are enlisted by Spencer’s lackey Harper (Fred Hechinger) in the school’s convict labor program, another aspect of the administrative corruption.

But the central element of “Nickel Boys” is the relationship between the two boys, which is strained by Elwood’s obsession to make conditions there public despite the dangers involved and Turner’s insistence that his friend is courting disaster.  The disaster that follows leads to Turner’s decision to arrange an escape for the two of them involving the theft of bicycles from the airheaded wife (Lucy Faust) of the warden; the attempt does not end well.

The layering of the narrative is complicated further by the periodic inclusions of sequences set in New York years later, in which the grown Elwood (Daveed Diggs) is making a life for himself, starting up a successful moving business even as he watches television reports of unidentified bodies being exhumed on the property of the old Nickels School.  These scenes revert to the first-person affectation of showing only the back of Elwood’s head, from which perspective we watch him build a new life and reunite in a bar with a dissolute Chickie Pete (Craig Tate).  They’re capped by a twist that you might not catch if you’re unobservant.

Even if you find the mode in which Ross has chosen to tell this fact-inspired fiction a miscalculation, the story’s power remains real, and the period settings are captured expertly in Nora Mendis’ production design and Brittany Loar’s costumes.  The performances are excellent as well, with both Herisse and Wilson convincing, Linklater persuasively loathsome and Ellis-Taylor absolutely touching.  And the slow, meditative score by Alex Somers and Scott Alario adds to the intimate mood. 

But viewers are likely to be divided about whether Ross’s approach is inspired or misguided.  Whether you call it impressionistic or immersive, many will find this a film that manages to be emotionally affecting in spite of itself.