FRAGMENTS: RaMell Ross's NICKEL BOYS (dir & co wri by Ramell Ross, w/ Ethan Harris & Brandon Wilson, Orion/MGM/Amazon, USA, 140mns, 2024)

A complex movie that feels like it might not totally work until it does, NICKEL BOYS is that rare species of bird: a movie that works towards a new film language.

Based on the Pulitzer prize winning 2019 novel THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead, the movie follows the budding friendship of two black teens-studious Elwood Curtis and pessimistic pragmatic Turner-during their time at the abusive Nickel Academy reform school in Florida.

The innovation here is to frame much of the movie in the filmic first person. We see the story as Elwood or Turner would see it. 

Whether by necessity once in the cutting room or as a further layer of cinema grammar innovation, Ross and his editor also intercut varied stock footage from the 1960's Apollo missions, earlier black and white film footage of black families, later 1980's footage of marathons, etc to create an Eisensteinian montage dialectic.

Both in the framing and the cutting, NICKEL BOYS works to tell a story in a novel way.

This doesn't always serve the story best. For the first third of the movie, mostly told from Elwood's POV, the technique is arresting. During the long middle part as the friendship between the two boys forms, the cutaways to stock footage start to feel like a band-aid to provide a break from the POV camera shots. As if the moviemakers realized two and a half hours of such a technique needs a contrast (and it probably does).

Layer on top of this a further cross-cutting strategy of jumping ahead twenty years to an adult Elwood working to make the most of his adult life at the same time he wants to bear witness to the atrocities committed at Nickel and you get an almost byzantine movie approach. 

Fascinating POV shots from the first person like this populate the entire movie.

The ambition of the movie is incredible. That same ambition also prevents the movie from getting an immersive narrative rhythm.

And yet the final movement of the film, which we won't spoil here, brings all the strands together in a powerful, intense way.

So that ultimately, the movie works incredibly. And that's what counts.

Ross's committed original voice approach puts the movie in that rare sub-genre of powerful stories told in innovative new ways. Malick's 2011 THE TREE OF LIFE, Zeitlin's 2012 BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, even French moviemaker Jean Vigo's 1934 L'ATALANTE all feel like spiritual aunts and uncles of NICKEL BOYS.

But NICKEL BOYS deals with subject matter and sins more troubling than the other movies. The novel and movie are based on actual abuses that occurred at Florida's Dozier school for 111 years. Nickel segregates its boys (even after the US law forbids it), exploits black youth labor, even murders black boys from time to time and buries them in unmarked graves on the property. 

The way the two friends react to this knowledge is key to the movie. Elwood, an activist and civil rights marcher when he was outside, is furious and wants to expose the school. Turner, pragmatic and clear eyed, doesn't see what can be done when all the institutional power works to conceal the abuse.

In an era where movie and television languages feel like they're both sliding to a middle ground that's not quite one or the other, NICKEL BOYS has the intelligence and daring to create a bracing blast of fresh cold air from mountain passes not yet explored.

If movies are going to reclaim some of the center stage of pop culture primacy, they need to take risks.

NICKEL BOYS takes plenty. And despite some stumbles, grasps the brass ring.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club