Nickel Boys

By Joannna Langfield

Nickel Boys

An uncompromising fever dream, RaMell Ross’s film, based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, is brilliant, challenging and frustrating. While I’m in awe of the filmmaker’s inspired artistry, I’m also not sure this is a definitive adaptation. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.

You can see the ties between Ross’s stunning experimental documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and this look back at a real Florida reform school, discovered to have emotionally and physically abused the boys in its care. Whitehead’s novel unblinkingly shows us the effects of that, through the eyes of two black boys, incarcerated there in the 1960’s. It is a searing, brilliant work. And when I finished reading it, I had no idea how anyone could make it into a film. By creating a piece that is insistently untraditional, telling the story from a first person perspective, jumping, often hazily, from era to era, Ross has made a film that is as beautiful as it is poignant. But, to me, it never quite reaches the devastating impact Whitehead delivers and the story deserves.

This is not to say the film is not effective. It is. Yes, you could let it wash over you, sweep you up into its own pace and visuals. The two women sitting next to me did just that. And then, confused by what is revealed, wondered aloud how it could have happened. They won’t be alone. This is not a film for traditionalists. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

For the record, the performances hit the right notes, especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s, heartbreakingly memorable as the grounded woman key to the boys’ lives.

But the star of this piece is its director, a filmmaker whose not often seen sense of the medium and genre is to be appreciated and encouraged.