Nickel Boys is a daring, dreamlike masterpiece about institutional racism

In 2019, the 42-year-old filmmaker and photographer RaMell Ross told Dazed that when he saw Koyaanisqatsi and The Tree of Life, his initial thought was that no Black man had ever been given $30 million to make their “masterpiece dream thing”. He then added, “What would be my version of that?”

Back then, Ross was discussing his debut feature, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a low-budget documentary that played a handful of arthouse theatres and received an Oscar nomination. Five years on, I’m chatting to Ross in Rosewood Hotel during the London Film Festival ahead of a gala presentation for Nickel Boys, his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Rewriting cinematic language with its POV shots, Nickel Boys had its theatrical release in the UK and US delayed for more awards-friendly dates, as insiders believe it’ll make an impact in numerous Oscar categories.

Is Nickel Boys what Ross deemed to be his “masterpiece dream thing”? “It’s so true!” exclaims Ross, howling in laughter. “I would never imagine that quote would catch up with me.” He pinpoints how Nickel Boys is unprecedented but in a different way. “The Tree of Life is so form-breaking, it’s like starting from zero. But this one started from Colson’s narrative. That was the structure and structure fundamentally. I just applied a form to it.” He adds, “There’s nothing in the film that has a single purpose. All the images have to be doing more than just narrative.”

What’s soon clear is that Nickel Boys is unlike any film you’ve seen before, except perhaps Hale County This Morning, This Evening. It’s Florida in 1962 when Elwood Curtis, a young Black boy, is wrongly accused by white police officers of stealing a car. Sent to Nickel Academy, Elwood finds himself at a violent, racist reform school where he and the other Black pupils are beaten, abused and treated like prisoners. The visual twist is that Nickel Boys is told almost entirely from the first-person perspective, switching between Elwood and a fellow Black teen, Turner. The duo are played by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, but they’re only visible in each other’s scenes, or if there’s a mirror present.

When pitching Nickel Boys, Ross used three scenes from Hale County This Morning, This Evening as a proof of concept, describing the film as if Elwood and Turner had cameras to make their own Hale County. However, Ross knew his approach to POV would be breaking new ground. “The only films we talked about were Lady of the Lake, Enter the Void, and Hardcore Henry. And obviously porn. The film couldn’t have any of those aesthetics.” What about Peep Show? “I only heard about Peep Show when it was all over. I’ve never seen it. Are you looking through a peep hole the whole time?”

Early on, a scene is played in full twice, once from Elwood’s viewpoint, and then, word for word, again from Turner’s perspective, revealing different tones and emotions. An audacious movie whereby the director clearly had final cut, it also intersperses its multi-timeline storyline with archival footage as if these tangential images will rewire the viewer’s brain. “You had classical music, but then you give Black people the same instruments, and you have jazz,” says Ross. “It’s the same with the camera. I use 8x10 cameras with slide film in the South, and my images look nothing like Walker Evans or William Christenberry.”

Before photography, Ross was poised to become a professional basketball player in the NBA. Injuries sparked a change of direction. “Basketball gives you a spatial reality that is great for cinema,” says Ross. “It helps you learn to read.” We discuss how Stanley Kubrick played chess (Ross reveals with disappointment that his chess.com score is 1300), while Yorgos Lanthimos used to shoot hoops in the Greek Basketball League. “I’ve got to hang with Yorgos. I think sports are going to be more tied to artmaking as all of these separate genres get integrated because of the internet.”

An experience is different from narrative. Narrative itself is something that’s understandable, but an experience is something that has a billion interpretations – RaMell Ross

Over the course of Nickel Boys, the viewer is aware of how exhausting it must be for whoever’s holding the camera. (It’s a mixture of Ross, cinematographer Jomo Fray, and camera operator Sam Ellison.) In doing so, the frame imitates Elwood and Turner’s head movements, deliberately never hitting marks precisely. Ross demonstrates with whooshing noises how cinema traditionally follows fixed positions. “But the way a person looks is, you’re late to things, and you’re also early. You move according to what you hear and think. You don’t know where the fuck you’re going.”

He continues, “It’s something I call observational logic, which comes from documentary language. It’s forcing the person to see what you want them to see within that space. You have to use a longer lens and shallow focus, and then you control the tension. If you’re controlling the tension, you’re doing POV. It just is POV. It’s not wide-angle POV. It’s not human POV. It’s a point of view. It’s not settling to actually be human perception, but trying to narrow it to the fundamentals of what it means to look and be in a place.”

After watching Nickel Boys twice in one week, I found certain images lingering in my head like music. One of them is where the camera floats in a swimming pool from Turner’s perspective, both above and below the surface, before diving down towards Elwood’s legs at the bottom. “My favourite cut is in that underwater scene,” says Ross. “There are two incredibly subtle moments where there’s someone looking at the camera in an archival moment where once you see it, it’ll fucking blow your mind.

“After that cut, right when Turner is reaching up with his left hand to touch the scars on the leg, we cut and on the left-hand side of the screen, in the corner, a girl looks at the camera like this.” Ross imitates it for me. “And then she looks away. It’s crazy! And in the Christmas montage when the Black kids are sitting up front, if you look at the audience, there’s a little girl looking at the camera, and dude, it’s so fucking haunting. It’s crazy.”

While the Nickel Academy is a fictional institution, it was based by Whitehead on the Dozier School in Florida, which was shut down in 2011 and found to have human remains with bullet wounds buried on its grounds. In the film’s present-day timeline, the camera hovers over the back of Daveed Diggs’s head as he reads news articles about the Nickel Academy that may as well be about the Dozier School. All of this grounds the film in an uncomfortable reality as it flashes back to Elwood and Turner fighting for survival as youths.

Ross also wanted Nickel Boys to be a “Black POV film” to depict the first time a Black person realises that they’re Black. The idea stemmed from before he read Whitehead’s novel. “But when the opportunity came, it seemed like there was no more powerful way to do it,” says Ross. “Why would I do it as an art piece when it can actually be resurrecting the dead? Essentially bringing Dozier boys to life? That just sounded so meaningful.” He adds, “It’s cool to be able to have someone understand that these are the identity processes that we all go through, most of the time, to a larger culture’s demise.”

Does he see the camera as being from the POV of the characters, or ultimately from the director? “I would like to say it’s completely me. All the images are essentially from my imagination. But it’s like how, as an author, every character is you. It’s Elwood, but also Elwood as a Black boy, and me as a Black boy. Hopefully other Black kids see themselves in these images.” If an image is too readable, Ross explains, then it’s quickly forgotten, but an image with mystery creates an experience. “An experience is different from narrative. Narrative itself is something that’s understandable, but an experience is something that has a billion interpretations.”

Nickel Boys is out in UK cinemas on January 3, 2025