Nickel Boys | 2024
Ethan Herisse stars as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner in director RaMell Ross’s NICKEL BOYS
RaMell Ross' exceptional documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) was the kind of debut that heralded a wholly unique new cinematic voice whose observational style finds something almost magical in the most mundane places and situations. Ross brings that same energy to his narrative feature debut, Nickel Boys, and the results are revelatory, as if we're watching the cinematic language be rewritten before our eyes.
The style is immediately bracing - Ross plunging us into the world he creates by using the camera as a first-person window into its specific milieu. The audience is placed squarely into the characters' POVs, forcing us to empathize with them in new and thrilling ways. Characters interact directly with the camera, giving us unprecedented access to their lived experience. This gives Nickel Boys a visceral sense of urgency - we're not just watching this story unfold onscreen - we are a part of it.
Yet it's not just that first-person POV that makes Nickel Boys so special; it's Ross' attention to detail that turns it into pure cinematic poetry. Ross' camera often focuses on details within the frame that most filmmakers ignore - a bracelet moving on a wrist, fading embers in discarded cigarette butts, the way an electrical cord unfurls on an iron as it presses clothes. These things are like the sensory memories that linger after their context has been forgotten, There's something incredibly tactile about this approach, the way it seems to approximate the memories of touch and smell, not just sight and sound. Ross' films are memory pieces keenly in tune with their environment, allowing us to take in the feeling of being there. It's a deeply empathetic and powerful approach, one that breathes breathtaking life into this story of two young black men who are railroaded into a juvenile reform school in the 1960s for crimes they did not commit.
The academy at its center is a kind of Kafka-esque nightmare, where innocent young men find themselves trapped and given impossible road maps for "rehabilitation" that they cannot possibly achieve because they are deliberately set up to fail. Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, a sea change that seems to be passing these boys by as they watch helplessly from the sidelines, Nickel Boys paints a haunting portrait of the oft-overlooked victims of institutional racism. By putting audiences in his protagonists' shoes, Ross invites us to participate in radical empathy, allowing its themes to resonate in disarming and profound ways.
Documentary filmmakers don't always transfer so seamlessly to narrative filmmaking, but what Ross does with Nickel Boys is extraordinary. It's the work of a filmmaker with a unique and powerful vision, the kind of film that makes you instantly sit up and take notice in recognition of something incredibly special. Hale County This Morning, This Evening was no fluke. RaMell Ross is the real deal.
