On Mar. 6, Screen/Society showed the acclaimed film “Nickel Boys” (2024) in the Ruby’s Film Theater. Directed by RaMell Ross and based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, “Nickel Boys” follows Black two boys, Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they endure the Nickel Academy reform school and its abusive and racist practices. Inspired by stories from the now-defunct Arthur G Dozier School for Boys, the film takes place in the Jim Crow era.
Elwood is a high-achieving, low-income Black student offered a full ride to a technical college. While hitchhiking to this college, he unknowingly accepts a ride in a stolen car. After the police pull over said vehicle, he is wrongly arrested for and convicted of theft and sent to Nickel Academy to serve his sentence. While struggling to adjust to his new reality, he meets and befriends Turner.
Early on, Elwood witnesses the horrific measures the Academy uses to keep its residents in line. After he scuffles with another boy, he is brutally whipped in a scene the film transforms into a visual and auditory experience full of cracks, snaps, groans and moans. With each hit, the viewer sees images of Black boys they can only assume were real students at the Arthur G Dozier School for Boys.
The film repeatedly highlights what life was like for African Americans during Jim Crow. In one scene set around a boxing match, Griff, a Black boy, is instructed by Nickel Academy’s head to throw the match in favor of his white opponent. During the match, white men in suits, presumably aware that the game is rigged, place bets on the white boy. The supporters of the two boxers divide almost perfectly along racial lines.
On the White side, spectators sport angry sneers as they cheer for the white fighter, symbolizing the era’s deep racial animosity. The film even cuts to a white young boy mouthing “Get that n****r” while making a noose-tying gesture. In contrast, the Black crowd members hide their faces in fear while watching the match, with many praying.
This scene perfectly demonstrates the parasitic relationship between white and Black populations in the Jim Crow South. While equal and fair on paper, the reality of the time was a system that to benefitted white people while pushing the Black community further into fear and submission.
To hammer home this message, the film portrays many forms of trauma and pain. Throughout the film, alligators are repeatedly shown, serving as an artistic metaphor for the suffering of Black children in America and providing a grim reminder of how these children were once used as alligator bait.
The film’s most interesting and unique aspect is that it was filmed entirely in a first person point of view, allowing the audience to see the lives of these students through their own eyes. This directorial choice elevates the impact of the character’s experiences, allowing viewers to almost enter the scenes and feel what is happening while evoking emotions that traditional filmmaking can never elicit.
The first person style is used to especially great effect in an early cafeteria scene that introduces Turner. We observe Elwood’s struggle again and again to find a place to sit through his own eyes until he is finally given a spot to sit by Turner. At the end of the scene, the audience sees a replay — this time through Turner’s perspective — marking the first time in the movie that we get a non-Elwood point of view.
This stylistic cinematographic choice also works perfectly with the film’s editing. The opening collage of scenes pairs this first-person view with minimal dialogue and a focus on the ambient sounds of life: birds chirping, grass rustling, jewelry clanging on a lady’s wrist, cards shuffling and ice moving within a cup. Transitions are also expertly crafted from time lapses to memories designed to resemble old video recordings. Viewers regularly experience waves of clips that leave them unable to grasp the full picture of a scene.
Some of these waves have darkened exposure, forcing viewers to closely examine what is being dimmed. Others are expertly cropped to make a point. In one hallway scene, the viewer sees the legs of a Black boy being dragged into a room. We then cut to another scene showing only his hands nervously shaking over a rail, before again cutting to a scene cropped to show just the lower half of the boy walking out of the room with his shirt untucked, followed by a white man with his shirt and pants messed up. The only sound during this pieced-together scene is distorted white noise with intermittent piano.
Overall, the film was an emotional rollercoaster, with viewers experiencing the boys’ lives through their own eyes — including the good, the bad and the traumatic. Once the film ends, viewers are left with the characters’ memories and the realization that what they just witnessed was someone’s reality.
“Nickel Boys” presents a history detached from the popular understanding of American society while serving as a powerful reminder that the oppression it documents was not that long ago. What’s more, the events and power structures it depicts are crucial to understanding how we got to where we are today. Although we lack the luxury of seeing things through others’ eyes in real life, by remembering and giving platforms for voices that go unheard, we can avoid potentially repeating past mistakes.
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