Movie Nation

In “Nickel Boys,” first-time feature director RaMell Ross almost overwhelms performance with technique.

Characters are obscured, faces hidden, glimpsed from the legs down to their shoes, passing by in the blur of memory. By the time we set our eyes on the protagonists and antagonists and their sad story, it’s almost a letdown from the breathless flickering, features-distorting extreme close-ups, archival news footage and the like that’s swept over us for so long.

The actors and the characters they’re playing eventually emerge, some warm or dangerous, most not wholly formed even after we get to know them.

But that turns out to be an ingenious approach in adapting Colton Whiteheads Civil Rights Era novel, a drama/jeremiad and mystery about racism and the long-ordained instruments of repression of white supremacist Southern culture.

It’s a non-linear memory play of childhood, a life interrupted and a dream deferred. Ross challenges the viewer to get into his film’s headspace, parse its meaning and even the characters themselves before they’re wholly seen and identified. And as he does, he forces us to face up to not the ancient past, but the recent one, and its implications for today as America leans into racism and Florida — the setting of the film — re-embraces racism, discrimination and even Naziism.

A child drifts through memories of orange trees in the yard and the adoring Nana (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) who raises him. Her guidance, and the later intervention of that one Tallahassee high school teacher that makes a difference (Jimmie Fails) hints that young Elwood (Ethan Herisse) may make more of himself than the menial, servile jobs that were all that Blacks in the 1960s American South had to look forward to.

His grandmother is a maid. Elwood has a shot at admission to a technical college.

Thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights movement activists seen on TV, and heard in speeches on LPs in Mr. Hill’s class, there’s a chance Elwood will grow up in a more just America. He’s moved to pick up a picket sign himself as Bull Connor unleashes dogs and firehoses on protesters on TV, racist mobs assault bus borne “freedom riders” and segregation endures, even at the cinema showing “The Ugly American.”

But making his way to that technical college is Elwood’s undoing. He hitches a lift from the wrong Black man in a turquoise car that isn’t his. “The system” grabs Elwood and will not let him go, even though he’s a minor, even though he’s innocent.

“Nickel Academy” is where he’s bound, sentenced there by a court system deaf to Black protests, Black evidence and the idea that Black lives might matter. It’s a panhandle Florida reform “school,” as savagely segregated as the rest of the state. White offenders have it relatively easy. The Black kids are barely “taught,” with “reform” and release an elusive pipe dream, thanks to the brutish disciplinarian (Hamish Linklater) and his Black staff minions.

The kids are put to work, not just at the school, but in the community — slave labor for local whites who need a garden tended, a porch painted or what have you. The white “students” are better fed, save on those days when state “inspectors” good-ol’-boy their way through a camp tour. The Black kids’ food is often sold, under the table, to white businesses in the community.

Bullied, scorned and quickly deluded about the “justice” of this place, his plight and his chances for surviving the experience, much less “graduating” from it, Elwood lets new pal Turner (Brandon Wilson) see the notebook he’s keeping — evidence, names, dates and addresses of grifts, bribes and those committing violence.

“If everybody looks the other way, then everybody’s in on it. If I look the other way, I’m as implicated as the rest.”

Ross, using a subjective camera, conceals characters in that not-distant past, and those who live on with the trauma and survivor’s guilt who stumble into each other decades later (the 1988 Seoul Olympics is seen on TV). That blunts some of the pathos, if not the empathy the viewer feels for anybody in that spot.

Our protagonist remembers watching “The Defiant Ones” on TV, never dreaming he’d be facing that kind of “slavery lives on” Southern “justice” system in his own life. That film prefigures his own in other ways, it turns out.

What’s striking here is how Ross — he directed the documentary “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening” — generates suspense, fear and empathy almost in spite of the way he bathes his movie in uncertainty and mystery. We question little of what we see, not because of the history that backs this damning drama up, but because the storytelling so vividly mimics the way memory works.

But memory can play tricks, safeguard the mind from trauma and bury unpleasant truths.

That can happen to people who have lived through something awful, or people who chose not to remember that Southern justice wasn’t dispensed the way it was depicted in that TV show whose theme tune one incarcerated Black teen is moved to whistle at the most ironic moment.

There’s a reason there were almost no (only one) Black faces in the entire run of that staple of white Southerners’ TV comfort food diet, “The Andy Griffith Show.”

In challenging “the good ol’days” and reminding us that Sleepy Time Down South was always a myth, one in danger of returning to American culture thanks to racist erasers of history and in challenging cinematic storytelling conventions to remember this ugly (fictionalized, inspired by real events) state-sponsored crime, Ross has made that rarest of films.

“Nickel Boys” is American history, Southern history and Florida history uncovered and exposed, and a cautionary lesson to a culture backsliding into the comfort of more and more lies and delusions, all served up in one of the most artful films of 2024.

Rating: PG-13, violence, racism, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson,
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Hamish Linklater.

Credits: Directed by RaMell Ross, scripted by RaMell Ross and Jocelyn Barnes, based on the novel by Colton Whitehead. An Orion Pictures, Amazon/MGM release.

Running time: 2:20