The Movie That Haunted Me More Than Any Other This Year

On a downtown street in Tallahassee, 1965, a young Black man stands in front of a store window filled with television sets, his faint reflection barely visible amid the colorful ads for Florida grapefruit. All at once, the TVs go blank and switch to a test pattern, and a man steps into the window and fiddles with a cable until the desired image appears: Martin Luther King Jr., addressing a crowd in Montgomery, Alabama, as the women on the street chatter about "all the goings-on in Selma." As King's voice rings out: "How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever," something shifts almost imperceptibly, a subtle adjustment of focus and light, and suddenly the boy we could barely see is standing there in front of us. It's as if King's words have called him into being.

Although Elwood Curtis is the protagonist of RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys , we rarely see him so clearly as in that fleeting moment. In adapting Colson Whitehead's novel , Ross and his co-screenwriter Joslyn Barnes have radically reworked it, trading the book's omniscient perspective for a first-person POV in which the viewer sees the world through the main character's eyes. When Elwood gazes up at the sky, lying back in the grass on a warm afternoon, we do too, catching a glimpse of his outstretched arm as his head lolls to the side. Watch closely, and you'll catch a glimpse of him reflected in the side of a steam iron as his hard-working grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), neatly smooths out the wrinkles in her laundry. But it's not until King speaks that he literally and figuratively comes into focus.

Nickel Boys is a movie of recovery and reclamation, an exhumation of history. Nickel Academy, the reformatory at the center of Whitehead's novel, was inspired by Florida's notorious Dozier School for Boys, where dozens of bodies in unmarked graves were discovered in the 2010s. A promising student and a favorite of his high school teacher's, Elwood is on his way to start classes at a Black technical college when he is arrested on a flimsy charge and condemned to Nickel, a segregated facility whose largely white staff takes special pleasure in exploiting and abusing its Black inmates. But without dulling the impact of its characters' suffering or minimizing the real-life atrocity behind its story, Ross' movie uses its sometimes intimate, sometimes alienating visual style to acknowledge that violence without inflicting it on its audience. "Reproducing trauma makes it seem like that's supposed to happen or that's normal," Ross told an audience at Brown University , where he teaches visual arts, last month.
"I'm interested in creating media that's as complex as the result of the violence."

Movies shot entirely from the protagonist's point of view are a small but notorious subgenre, with a nearly unblemished record of abject failure. MGM gamely billed Robert Montgomery's The Lady in the Lake , in which the camera takes on the role of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled sleuth Philip Marlowe, as "A Revolutionary Innovation in Film Technique," but the movie was a flop that almost ended Montgomery's career, and while some intrepid filmmaker has attempted to rediscover the idea every decade or so since, the results have rarely been any better. The POV conceit invariably registers as a gimmick, and instead of producing the desired synthesis between character and audience, the technique keeps us at arm's length; we're compelled to think more than ever about what the camera is doing. We're seeing through someone else's eyes, but not with their mind.

Ross and his cinematographer Jomo Fray, however, want us to be thinking about every shot, contemplating the weight of every image. This isn't a movie that believes a generic "you" can frictionlessly inhabit the consciousness of a young Black man—nor that any point of view can be neutral or universal. Before making his narrative debut with Nickel Boys , Ross was a photographer and a documentarian, and he carries over from those disciplines an uncommon thoughtfulness, at least among fiction filmmakers, about the ethics and implications of his visual choices, not just what is best for the story. With his Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening , a lyrical portrait of Black life in rural Alabama, Ross aimed to disrupt the way white photographers have tended to depict Black Southerners, not just prompting his audience to see his subjects differently but " to let someone see the way that they're seeing ." The movie brings us into Elwood's body bit by bit—a glimpse of his hand as he releases a balloon to float up toward a ceiling fan, a flash of his face reflected in a bus window—because it wants us to understand how he is beginning to understand himself, as seen by and in reaction against the vision of a deeply prejudiced society. In a high school classroom, his teacher, a Freedom Rider who bears a scar above one eye from where a white bigot hit him with a tire iron, plays the students one of King's speeches. His voice crackling with the wear etched into the record's grooves, King tells his listeners that they must walk the streets every day with a sense of dignity and "somebody-ness." It's not enough for Nickel Boys to embody Elwood; he has to be somebodied .

Nickel Boys doesn't just show us what Elwood sees, but what he feels. Its camera eye is a subjective one. When Elwood, after taking part in his first Civil Rights protest, is unsettled by the sound of nearby conflict on a deserted city street, we suddenly see an alligator crawling its way along the curb. Nicholas Monsour's editing makes associative leaps through time and space, skipping years and sometimes decades, and allowing Ross to interpolate images of the real Dozier School, mixing archival footage and historical artifacts in with his fictionalized account. Unlike Whitehead's novel, which can be brutally explicit about the tortures of Nickel, Ross' movie largely depicts them through implication. There is little blood and less in the way of racist language. (The N-word is silently mouthed once as part of an impressionistic montage; one of Nickel's relatively sympathetic white inmates, played by Fred Hechinger, starts to yell it out but cuts himself off after the first consonant.) Ross isn't soft-pedaling the country's history of racial violence, but he also seems disinclined to reenact it. Where 12 Years a Slave made a bravura set piece of slave-whipping, Ross cuts away as Elwood approaches his turn in Nickel's notorious "white house," where the walls are spattered with the dried blood of the boys who have gone before him. Before he does, though, we see the actor playing Elwood, Ethan Herisse, walk into what we thought was a shot from his point of view, his back already bared for the strap. It's as if we've been ejected from Elwood's mind along with him, disconnecting from the body about to be brutalized. Even the memory of violence can trigger that disassociation. When Hattie tells the story of how her father was arrested for an imagined insult to a white woman and later found hanged in his jail cell, we see a close shot of her fingers delicately scraping cake off a knife, exposing the sharpness hidden inside the sweet.

Elwood's isn't the only perspective Nickel Boys takes into account. As Elwood settles in, he makes friends with Turner (Brandon Wilson), a sly, streetwise boy who counsels Elwood on the best way to survive his time at Nickel, even if means occasionally abandoning his principles. From Elwood's point of view, Turner is bright and welcoming, the first person at Nickel to treat him as something other than a nuisance or a threat. But when the camera jumps into Turner's head, the Elwood we see isn't the boy who materialized in that shop window, but a bedraggled figure who looks beaten down before the first blow has landed on him. The Elwood who appears to others is so different from the one we've come to know from the inside that the first clear sight of him is startling.

The movie switches, subtly and sometimes without warning, from Elwood's perspective to Turner's and back. It takes several viewings to grasp how deftly Ross and Fray guide our attention from one to the other, and even after three times, there are images it feels like I've never seen before alongside those I'll never forget, and ones I still don't know what to make of.It's as if Ross wants us to think about them, but also to be mindful of the limits of our understanding, to leave knowing that we haven't gotten it all, and we never will. It's haunted my mind like nothing else I've seen this year, and I expect will haunt it for years to come.

Before his students begin their study of American history, Elwood's teacher passes out black markers alongside their hand-me-down textbooks, for the purpose of "striking out all the latest epithets of white youth." In his installation piece " Black Dictionary ," Ross copied out entries from a child's dictionary, adding the word "Black" before each, a project that expands their definitions and occasionally renders them incoherent. (He scrawled the text by hand while shipping himself inside a container from Rhode Island to Alabama, re-creating the escape from slavery of Henry "Box" Brown, a journey which also gave rise to a time-lapse sequence in Nickel Boys shot by Ross from inside a traveling boxcar.) Adding onto existing structures can produce worthwhile results, but it also limits the range of inquiry. Nickel Boys feels like an attempt to build from the ground up, to create a new way of understanding history without being confined by it. As he sends his most promising student off to his college classes, Elwood's teacher calls up the dream of a world where Black people tell their own stories of America, rather than annotating someone else's: "Imagine a textbook with nothing to cross out." RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys is that text.