It is 40 minutes into Nickel Boys, and we finally get to see our protagonist’s face. Until then, we have glimpsed Elwood – first as a young boy, then as a teenager, growing up in 1960s Florida – only in reflection. He stares back at us from a metal iron, in a shop window, through the lens of a photo booth. The film is shot almost exclusively from a single point-of-view camera – a technique that references the 1947 noir Lady in the Lake, or the 2000s sitcom Peep Show (depending on how high-brow you are feeling). Nickel Boys is an experiment in form from director RaMell Ross (whose previous works have been documentaries): an arthouse, stylised project with unusual commercial appeal thanks to its origins as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Colson Whitehead’s 2019 work of the same name.
Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp), who has been raised by his grandmother (played by inimitable Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), is a freedom fighter who, in a wrong place, wrong time miscarriage of justice, ends up at a penal institution for young boys, the Nickel Academy. There, white boys are allowed to play American football while the black boys work the land and face severe beatings for disobedience (in a rare exception to the first-person perspective, the camera pans away from Elwood, sparing the viewer the grotesque violence of films like 12 Years a Slave).
The idealistic Elwood strikes up a friendship with another boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson). Turner is a cynic, who has already once been returned to the Nickel having run away. He sees Nickel as a place afflicted with the same problems as the outside world, only more honest: “In here, nobody has to act fake anymore.” And it is through his eyes that we first see our protagonist fully.
The opening scenes of the film – seen through the eyes of Elwood as a young child – have a hazy, dream-like illogic. We are drawn to whatever catches the eye of the child: the sparkling ornaments on a Christmas tree, filmed from beneath its branches; the gold of a bangle on his mother’s wrist; the glow of a cigarette burning out in an ash tray. Though the film’s narrative crystallises as Elwood grows older, its point of view remains impressionistic, at times restrictively subjective, leaving the audience to piece together what is happening.
The extensive use of archive footage adds to this sense, in part to set the story in the wider context of the civil rights movement. Clips from Martin Luther King’s “How Long? Not Long” speech after the Selma march and of racial segregation under Jim Crow laws in the South are spliced with footage of the moon shot during the space race – a contrast that highlights the chasm between America’s ambitions for itself on the world stage and for its own citizens.
More interesting, though, are the interspersed clips from Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958), a racial morality tale in which a white and a black prisoner must learn to get along because they are literally yoked together in a chain gang. On its release, the film was loved by white liberals and deplored in Harlem – in The Devil Finds Work James Baldwin decried its “disastrous sentimentality”. Perhaps its inclusion here is a comment from Ross: Nickel Boys is not that kind of film. There are other points of referential cultural criticism: in some of the film’s more surreal moments, an alligator hisses in an alleyway, or in the corner of a classroom, leading us to consider the 19th-century American trope of black children being used as alligator bait.
There are many places in which the first-person camera proves more effective than a more conventional approach might: we experience for ourselves the hard stare of a white abuser, and cast our gaze downward to our (Elwood’s) shoes; in one of Nickel Boys’ most moving scenes, we hug Elwood’s grandmother. The cinematographer Jomo Fray’s camera often lingers on the details other filmmakers don’t have time for: the edge of a knife being scraped of frosting against a cut-glass cake stand; a magnet holding a pamphlet as it slides down a fridge door; a man sucking his finger to remove his wedding ring in the moments before committing unspeakable violence. Combined with a diegetic, and in places dissonant, score by Alex Somers and Scott Alario, these details give Nickel Boys a deeper sensory quality.
Yet I found the single point-of-view camera, intended to be immersive, mostly alienating and conspicuous: watching Nickel Boys, I never once stopped being aware of the conceit. This is an extraordinarily confident and provocative feature film debut from Ross, and deserves high critical praise. But so much of the emotional connection to a character is, to me, found in watching their feelings register on their face, in observing the dynamics between two people – physical and emotional – as they share a space. Without that, Nickel Boys offers more style than satisfaction.
[See also: The Renaissance in drawing]