‘Nickel Boys’ Review: Childhood’s Brutal End

This visually inventive adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel follows two boys at an abusive school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

The first time that you clearly and truly see the teenage heartbreaker in “Nickel Boys,” he is walking up to a new friend. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) has just arrived at the fictional reform school referenced in the title when he sits down opposite Turner (Brandon Wilson) at a communal table. They’re in a large dining room crowded with children of varying sizes, shapes and bearings, and while some seem to be on the cusp of manhood, many look too obscenely young to be here. Their chatter and laughter obscures the horrors of this place. You only need to look closer to see that some of these children are already ghosts.

Different types of kids populate RaMell Ross’s painful, boldly expressionistic adaptation of the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel, “The Nickel Boys.” The children at the school are by turns determined, defeated and stunned, almost hollowed out. Ross cradles them all in a soft, beautiful light. With great sensitivity to the power of the cinematic image — and to the history of abject representations of Black humanity — he keeps on cradling them. Even when the story turns unbearably cruel, Ross insists on beauty as an imperative; it is, among other things, a rebuke to the annihilating ugliness of Nickel and to those who oblige its horrors.

Elwood arrives at the Nickel Academy, as it’s called, after he’s unfairly caught up in an injustice. It’s 1962 when a sympathetic teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) taps Elwood — a sober, studious 16-year-old high-school student in Tallahassee, Fla. — to take a class at a local college. On his first day to the college, Elwood inadvertently hitches a ride with a car thief. Wrongly implicated in the crime, he is taken from the home he shares with his loving grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who, with his parents long gone, is raising him on her own. He’s subsequently sent to Nickel, where his story begins in earnest.

“A prison for children” is how a 1903 report referred to the Jim Crow-era emblem, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which had been founded just three years earlier and would inspire Whitehead’s novel. There, for decade after decade, hundreds of ostensibly troubled boys, most Black, were confined, worked, terrorized and killed. (Among their offenses: “incorrigibility.”) Some disappeared. About 100 children are known to have died at the school from fire, disease, blunt-force trauma and gunshot wounds. After Florida shut down the school in 2011 following several investigations, one by the Justice Department, the state ordered a separate inquiry that led to the excavation of 55 unmarked graves.

The movie, written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, adheres to the novel’s narrative arc even as it condenses the story. In vivid, dreamy visual bursts, Ross glides over Elwood’s early childhood and explores his growing interest in the civil rights movement, which he carries to Nickel. There, Elwood settles into the racially segregated quarters, surveys the scene — he notes the Black students’ tattered clothing — and meets Turner. He also experiences Nickel’s culture of violence when, after defending another kid from bullies, some adult employees take him to a building called the White House. Inside this hell, he is so brutally flogged by a white supervisor (Hamish Linklater as Spencer) that he ends up in the school hospital.

Ross takes an oblique approach to this scene, using narrative ellipses to avoid making a spectacle out of sadistic white violence on Black bodies. To that end, as he does from the very beginning of the movie, he shows you only what Elwood sees, a strategy that pulls you to the character and which Ross sustains for an unusually long time for a commercial movie. Through Elwood’s darting eyes and keen ears, you see and hear what he does. In the White House, you hear the rhythm of the strap and the thunderous roar of a fan that never fully obscures the children’s cries. You see a light, a Bible, another boy’s hand clutching a frantically jittering leg. You also see blood on Spencer’s shirt but not how it got there.