Staggering camerawork informs the visually and emotionally rich triumph Nickel Boys

A flash bulb goes off. At that moment, a photographic record is created. It captures two male students of the Nickel Academy, one White, and one Black, standing beside a truck. Inevitably, this photo will be plastered across various newspapers in the coming days. "Look at how well this establishment trains our young men!" the press will crow. Folks will point to this image as proof that Nickel Academy is molding "troubled" youth into worthy participation in society.

Photos say one thing. Reality often says another. Nickel Boys exemplifies this. Writer/director RaMell Ross (adapting the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel The Nickel Boys) constantly fills the screen in Nickel Boys with pre-existing elements like arcane instruction videos, faded photographs, and the opening of The Defiant Ones. These digressions have previously dominated American culture. They also paint a skewed, incomplete portrait of reality. Such footage is sharply contrasted against the intimate first-person imagery dominating Nickel Boys. Through the eyes of this story’s two protagonists, audiences bear witness to the reality erased in things like that tidy photograph.

Nickel Boys begins on the grass. Elwood (played initially by Ethan Cole Sharp, but primarily inhabited by Ethan Herisse) is sitting there on the lawn, arm stretched out. Glorious sunlight beams down from the sky. This is the figure we’ll be seeing most of Nickel Boys through. After this tranquil opening, we see his cozy home life with grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in a magnificent performance). Elwood lives a thoughtful life full of promise. One of his teachers even suggests he should try taking courses at a nearby technical college. However, he’s growing up in an era of great upheaval. It’s the 60s, and activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are calling for long-overdue overhauls in America.

You never know when your life will change forever. A simple act of hitchhiking leads to police accosting Elwood. Afterward, they claim he’s connected to an automobile robbery. Elwood is now forced to attend Nickel Academy. This brutal segregated institution is run by folks like Spencer (Hamish Linklater). The leaders here speak openly about Nickel Academy attendees must “become obedient” and never rebel if they want to have any hope of leaving. These expectations are carried out through unpaid manual labor, rigid lessons, and an endless wave of physical abuse. The inexperienced Elwood eventually befriends the cynical Turner (Brandon Wilson), a teenager returning to Nickel Academy after a previous stay and a brief brush with freedom. Their bond leaves a mighty impact on Elwood even as he grows into a man (played by Daveed Diggs) who can’t escape the trauma he experienced.

Cinema is typically a spectator sport. Traditional movies position cameras so that audiences can function as an onlooking deity removed from the action. You’re not meant to exist in the same room as these fictional souls. Some early sound films even took this concept to punishing extremes, such as The Broadway Melody capturing musical numbers in expansive wide shots simulating the experience of being in the top row of an auditorium watching a live stage performance. Later films refined this shooting style into something malleable and exciting. Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray, meanwhile, masterfully subvert this standard for Nickel Boys. Intimacy is the name of the game here. In other words, this feature is the opposite of whatever was going on in The Broadway Melody’s framing.

Hollywood has occasionally dabbled in making films told from the point-of-view of people who were there. Typically, though, these manifest as found-footage genre titles that still provide some barrier (the camcorder, namely) between the audience and in-world characters. Even a meticulously realized drama like Suzhou River is told through a camcorder, not a person's pupils. Only in genre films such as the insufferably bro-y Hardcore Henry has there been a feature-length commitment to first-person filming. Nickel Boys, meanwhile, tells its story through this means in an effortless fashion. Its cinematography is utterly impressive yet achieves the invisibility all great technical movie qualities strive for. While watching Nickel Boys, I was fully convinced I was inside Elwood and Turner’s point-of-view. Constant thoughts of “How’d they pull that camera angle off?” evaded my mind. I was too busy marveling at Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor's deeply restrained yet endlessly affecting performance!

Visual ingenuity exists everywhere in Nickel Boys. This includes what material Ross and company put on-screen and what’s left unspoken. The physical torment of the Nickel Academy students is heard. However, it's not depicted explicitly on-screen. We see the aftermath of these horrors, certainly. The sound of Elwood’s suffering at the hands of Spencer, though, is set to flickering static images of various Nickel Academy students. This speaks to a great emphasis on varied responses characters have to omnipresent turmoil. The wildly differing worldviews of Elwood and Turner are one manifestation of this. Adult Elwood’s adult reunion with Chickie Pete (Craig Tate) is another.

In the latter sequence, the camera, positioned right behind Elwood, captures Pete’s haunted expression as he recalls walking through “human flesh” and “blood” as a child at Nickel Academy. In this unbroken, deeply captivating shot, Tate’s body language and tense line deliveries vividly realize the lingering psychological impact of adolescent trauma. Ross never wavers away from focusing on the disparate responses to those psychological lacerations between Pete and Elwood. These visual priorities inform this feature’s unforgettable imagery. Another tremendous example of such striking filmmaking comes through a POV shot set inside a moving boxcar executed like one of those old time-lapse videos on YouTube.

The way light moves across the boxcar in these discordant shots is remarkable. Cascading light beams are one of many tiny everyday details Ross and Fray lovingly frame. This motion picture infuses warmth into simple shots like a ceiling fan pull chain wrapped around a child’s finger or Elwood and Turner gazing up at their reflection in a mirror-covered ceiling. Nickel Boys doesn’t shy away from grueling material. However, it’s also ultimately about the essentiality of profound bonds between people. Reinforcing that concept through its warmest images leads to Nickel Boys delivering, among other accomplishments, one of the greatest depictions of a hug ever put to the silver screen.

Editor Nicholas Monsour and the screenplay assemble these awe-inspiring images in a transfixing non-linear fashion. Nickel Boys wisely eschews narration to guide viewers through its exploration of various points in Elwood’s life. That restraint exhibits how Ross makes such pronounced but not heavy-handed creative decisions on Nickel Boys. Strikingly crafted imagery and deeply evocative editing speak for themselves. Who needs them to get upended by a pedagogic voice-over?

Plus, the lack of expository handholding (like the innately finite space of the narrow aspect ratio) reinforces the constant lack of closure Elwood has over his misery at Nickel Academy. He didn’t know the full extent of what was going on as a child. Answers still elude him as an adult. On-screen imagery leaning towards the interpretative rather than the didactic perfectly fits into that. Nickel Boys does, however, produce other auricular qualities just as magnificent as its visual scheme.

This includes a tremendous original score from composer Alex Somers and Scott Alario, both reuniting Ross after their collaborations on Hale Country This Morning, This Evening. Somers and Alario intentionally create a sonic landscape that is at war with itself for this production. Traditional orchestral flourishes harshly brush up against compelling atonal qualities. Strained violin strings, harsh cracking noises, or emulations of a record skipping are just a few of the unorthodox sounds littering their various tracks.

These jagged intrusions vividly evoke the messiness of minds coping with trauma. Abuse can come from anyone anywhere. Equally erratic ways are the ways reminders of abuse reverberate into one’s life long into the future. Somers and Alaria simulate this reality with their disjunct Nickel Boys score. Amazingly, they accomplish this feat while also creating tracks rich with unspoken emotions between the characters. These compositions truly are an expansive marvel.

Equally absorbing in Nickel Boys is the sound design. The artists in this department, including Joel Scheuneman, Kirby Leonard, and Curtis Henderson (among many others), deliver exceptional work making even the tiniest noises in this world impactful. A marble bouncing down a set of stairs makes this wonderful crack as it descends. A moving monologue from Hattie, while she’s cutting a cake, is subtly accentuated by soft noises like a napkin cleaning off a knife.

Adult Elwood’s adult reunion with Chickie Pete (Craig Tate) largely eschews a score in favor of random tavern noises. The clatter of bottles and background chatter dominating the soundtrack, rather than unstoppable conversations between Pete and Elwood, beautifully crystallizes the gulf between these two survivors. Rich attention to detail in these noises proves pivotal in making Nickel Boys flourish as a first-person experience. The sights RaMell captures on-screen feel so emotionally immediate because of these tiny auditory flourishes.

Late into Nickel Boys, we see home video footage from the early 2000s of Elwood with his wife. This crackling footage, rife with little imperfections, features the two giggling together and Elwood expressing how much he loves his partner. Like that photograph from the 60s, this home video can’t begin to paint a full portrait of reality. Surely Elwood and his wife were not this happy all the time. Nor does this fragment of their union speak to Elwood’s larger psychological profile. It’s just a brief flash of existence.

What this home video footage does have, though, is humanity. It’s the kind of thing Nickel Academy wants to stamp out of its captive students in the name of “obedience”. It’s also a quality Nickel Boys emphasizes constantly in its imagery. Hattie’s love for her grandchild. Elwood and Turner’s unexpected friendship. A briefly glimpsed romantic connection between a woman and Elwood in the 70s. The bonds and complicated emotions between these characters are beautifully rendered within the endlessly audacious Nickel Boys' filmmaking style. No wonder this RaMell Ross directorial effort proves as immensely moving as it is visually unprecedented.