Immersive Storytelling: RaMell Ross's Cinematic Odyssey in "Nickel Boys"

In finding a new way to adapt Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross changes the way we perceive the world itself. The director's previous feature, the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was a lightning-strike cinematic discovery. With its fragmented, intimate lyricism, it immersed us in the details of Black life in a small Alabama town, gradually centering on a few years in the lives of two teens. Hale County was an outgrowth of Ross's work as a photographer, but as a moving picture it was revelatory: The director's intense focus on mundane but lovingly captured details allowed us to imagine a whole world beyond the frame in all its wonder and sadness.

A Cinematic Odyssey Exploring the Depths of the Human Experience

Subjective Storytelling: Immersing the Audience in the Lives of Elwood and Turner

Nickel Boys takes Ross's formal effort even further, despite being a period piece and a scripted literary adaptation. Telling the stories of two Black teens confined to a brutal Florida reform school, Ross almost entirely adopts a subjective camera, shooting from the point of view of his protagonists. This approach, while challenging, allows the audience to truly inhabit the experiences of Elwood and Turner, forging a deep emotional connection with their struggles and triumphs.The switch in perspective between Elwood and Turner inaugurates a formal shift, as if the movie were slipping our perceptual bonds, drifting in unexpected directions. As these young men's lives become more distressed and precarious, we start to see visions of an older Elwood (played in his later years by Daveed Diggs) doing archival research into what happened at Nickel Academy. We experience the movie as Elwood, as Turner, as an older Elwood, as an outside observer, in the present tense and the past, within and without, each perspective informing and subtly undercutting the others.

Blending Realism and Impressionism: Capturing the Essence of Black Life

Like the novel, the film begins from young Elwood's perspective, as we see delicate glimpses of a child discovering the world around him. Ross finds images and sounds that are warm, textured, and evocative: Voices drift, faces pass, hands dance in ways both familiar and beautiful to us as viewers. Christmas trees and imagined family talismans. Subtly, we imagine Elwood through the filter of our own lives, and his gathering tragedy starts to feel like our own.This unique form of identification is at the heart of Ross's picture. In fact, it's been at the heart of his entire project as a filmmaker. Back in 2018, Hale County served as a gentle rebuke to the totalizing, omniscient approach of so many au courant and supposedly objective longitudinal documentaries, movies shot over years that purported to examine and explain the lives of marginalized people. With Nickel Boys, Ross takes the accumulation of lived-in detail that made the earlier film so bracing and turns it into something more collagelike and formally daring but without sacrificing narrative power.

Resisting Easy Pathos: Exploring the Complexities of Human Suffering

Nickel Boys is the kind of story that probably could have been adapted in more conventional fashion. It could have jerked easy tears from us — earned tears, to be sure, prompted by our horror at what we'd be seeing onscreen and everything it implied. But there's something truer and more unshakable about what Ross has given us. In refusing a conventional, objective (and objectified) approach to suffering, he resists easy attempts at pathos. What he achieves here is more powerful and complex. When we're finally wrenched out of this film, we sense that something very real has been taken away from us.