Nickel Boys Movie Review

We take a look at how the new film engages with Colson Whitehead's novel

Hello TBM fans! I’m Jordan, the Engineer for the Book Maven: A Literary Revue and a passionate champion for film. Starting today, and on a semi-regular basis, I’ll be breaking down an adapted film, putting it in context with its source material, and analyzing it as a cinematic text. These films could be old or new, but will typically be relevant to something happening in the zeitgeist. Our first entry will be RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, a film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.

I have never experienced a film that depicts its source material so scrupulously, while at the same time throwing out linear storytelling for a more hypnotic approach. In Nickel Boys, Ross transforms the book’s omniscient narrative, which resembles reportage, to a more lyrical, first-person POV putting the film in a kind of conversation with its source. What we get is less an objective recounting of what happened at the school, and more a series of recollections building into a more enigmatic perspective.

The film, like the novel, follows Elwood Curtis, a Black should-be college student who is wrongfully convicted of car theft and sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school rife with abuse. The book tells Elwood’s story with precision, almost a journalistic account of a real person and school (The Nickel Academy is a fictional institution based on the very real Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida). The film, however, tells the story through subjective accounts. By allowing the action to unfold in first-person form, we are limited to the perspectives of Elwood, and later Turner, who Elwood befriends at Nickel.

There are times where we cut back to more recent events. We see a character who goes by Elwood looking at news stories about the former institution. Then we catch up with Elwood’s classmates, now older, but still victims of the system that stole those years from them. And at other times, the film splices in material like familiar scenes from movies, or historical images like those of the moon landing, providing context to the suffering it depicts. This technique roots our understanding of the story within the full context of our nation’s history; that while white men were exploring the next frontier, these young Black boys and men were confined to a cruel institution.

In the case of Nickel, anonymous graves, undecipherable artifacts, and deliberately erroneous bookkeeping serve as stand-ins for history books that fail to show the truth. The film replaces those falsifications with scenes from the oral tradition that intertwines Sidney Poitier’s films, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, and every student at Nickel. It tells us that the specific actions of one experience are not the lessons to be learned from Whitehead’s novel, but rather the collective history of carceral oppression that allowed, and still allows, countless lives to be uprooted and repurposed at the hands of white supremacy.

In staying true to Whitehead’s narrative, Ross makes an honest contribution to Whitehead’s novel, and the societal ills it depicts. By changing the narrative point of view, he offers a lens which removes individual gazes, allowing us to see the lives and history from our own memories and inferences. With this technique, the film connects each individual’s experience to a larger oral tradition, and expands the scope of the book without overstepping its intentions. Nickel Boys engages with the text rather than simply copying and pasting it. It’s a challenging film but it rewards with its wisdom and vision.