How “Nickel Boys” Critiques the Camera in America Cinema

Taken together, three recent films provoke a profound questioning of how and why we guard the border walls separating documentaries from dramatic features. These movies sabotage genre purity; the modes which are supposed to stay apart—as a matter of ethics, as a matter of aesthetics, as a matter of awards business—touch and pollute each other. The first is “The Zone of Interest,” the English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s study of the ritualistic domesticity of the Nazi administrative class. In the film’s complex coda, Glazer steps away from the realm of historical fiction, a leave he takes violently. A bureaucrat retches, the setting dissolves, and we find ourselves in a famous museum that solemnizes the former death camps. The bureaucracy we now face is that of history-making—an impotence, we might feel, in comparison to the system of extermination it is meant to memorialize—as we watch a cleaning worker maintain the floors.

The second feature is “Dahomey,” by the French Senegalese director Mati Diop, streaming in the States as of mid-December, which complicates genre in the other direction. Documentary as a descriptor feels terse. Diop has made a talismanic movie about the “impossibility of return,” as she told my colleague Julian Lucas in a recent profile. “Dahomey,” a process film, follows the journey of twenty-six Beninese art works, repatriated from the looting French back to Benin, in West Africa. The observational shots are complicated by a strange aural motif. Diop gives one art work, Artifact No. 26, a wooden figuration of the Dahomean King Ghezo, a literal “voice”—a charismatic ghost-in-the-machine rattle, performed by Makenzy Orcel.

And in the third and most recent film, “Nickel Boys,” directed by the Black American director RaMell Ross, it’s the whole of the drama—a remarkable one, about institutions, Black male friendship, social mimicry, and the Black political dream—that feels shot through with the history of American image-making. The archive of our world, meaning photos, film, and news footage, breaches the fiction plane of “Nickel Boys.” So, too, does the archive of other worlds. An alligator—making us think of early American media that depicted Black babies as alligator bait—mysteriously stalks a character in the film. Ross is an impressionist rooting through a collective subconscious. He exploits the feeling that documentary produces, the feeling that we are in the presence of indomitable truth, to explore how truth gets buried.

“Nickel Boys” arrives this winter with a Great American Novel atmosphere overshadowing it. The script is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Nickel Boys,” from 2019, which rendered, in an ascetic prose, the story of two Black boys, Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, who are functionally disappeared to a corrupt reform institution in rural northern Florida in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Would Ross suit up for Hollywood and turn a Great American Novel into a Great American Film? This was the question many asked, when it was first announced that Ross would direct the adaptation. The filmmaker, who’s forty-two, is a protean talent; he works across essay, photography, and film, creating vulnerable collages of Black people living, such as “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” about a community in Alabama’s Black Belt. Ross, who hung around his subjects for five years, didn’t even realize he was making the documentary. He is an artist whom none of us wanted to see adjust to the scythe of big-budget cinema.

Ross both has and hasn’t given us a Great American Film. “Nickel Boys,” with its intelligence and, surprisingly, its sentimentality, critiques the camera in American cinema. This is the kind of movie that gives and gives but holds back, too. It’s an exercise in powerful uncoöperativeness, reserving some of the breadth of life from sight. This was the point, I think, in deleting the definite article from the title of the adaptation.

The subject of “Nickel Boys” is subjectivity. This movie, shot almost entirely from the perspective of the characters, is interested in consciousness itself, and the formation of it in the America that Jim Crow wrote. As soon as the film begins, the viewer is made strongly aware of herself—her looking—and of her body, which experiences a vertigo. But it’s not the misalignment of the voyeur. Nor is Ross feeding an empathy machine. It’s a kind of narrowing to the personal. Ross creates a first-person world of closeups, fadeouts, visual ellipses, and other motifs that sometimes orient us and other times alienate us. The composition recalls the famous arrangers of twentieth-century life—Norman Rockwell, Gordon Parks, Terrence Malick—but skewed. We know what we are looking at: a citrus picked from a branch; a glittering Christmas tree; a deck of cards shuffled drunkenly; a beautiful couple nuzzling on a couch; a pressed suit, hanging proudly, waiting for its man. And, as the images accrete, we start to know that we are somewhere south—Frenchtown, Florida—and that we’re looking from a unique perspective: that of a child, named, as we find out, from his loving grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Elwood (played, in his younger years, by Ethan Cole Sharp). Ross and his cinematographer Jomo Fray have created warm, prelapsarian images to open their film. The rhythm of the sequence is memory-making; a fall is coming.

That fall is knowledge—in this case, knowledge of one’s own difference. What Ross does, with his highly formal conceit, is to return shock—a pained grandeur—to the moment of race realization. The cinema, the people, we feel jaded about this, unconsciously. A country saddled with its legends, borne as much through slavery as by Hollywood, takes for granted the act of looking at one’s self. Blackness derives its first and simplest meaning from the image. And, from the first lynching postcard to the first mute Sambos of cinema, we have been drowned in images that want to tell us what Blackness is, and how it is doomed. But every child has to figure this out on their own for the first time. So when young Elwood, growing older, begins to make sense of what Martin Luther King, Jr., and the other agitators are saying, he looks at his arm. The camera, which is his eye, lingers, to show the depth of understanding.

Elwood is a sensual being; Ross has him notice funny synchronicities, like the coördinating steps of his grandmother and a white stranger at a shop. As he grows taller, the vantage of his world expands to include the cultural and the political. Here, Ross begins his slip into the documentary gesture. Where is the canonical image of American scientific progress, of man going to space? In the book, Elwood watches the moon landing on television. In the adaptation, the images of space exploration are not diegetic but spliced into the film itself, as the movie abandons the first person. This suggests a kind of historical parallelism—a visual translation of Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “Whitey on the Moon,” say. A poem of discontent that we know, but a poem that Elwood, living in the sixties, wouldn’t have known. In another scene, young Elwood looks in the window of an electronics store in town. He, and therefore we, see his reflection superimposed on the screens, which are transmitting an address by King. Elwood’s dressed smartly, and his grandmother, standing beside him, receives compliments on the politeness of her grandson, who “does not need much righting.”

As Elwood ages, his voice deepens, and we know we’re being held by another actor, Ethan Herisse. In Herisse’s perfectly modulated speech, we hear the makings of a race man. He is a stellar student, an acolyte of King. At his segregated school, a teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), a Freedom Rider, marks him for the struggle and for educational success. Elwood attends a protest of a film at a local theatre and is photographed. The picture, which runs in the paper, worrying Nana, gives Elwood a sense of importance. Already, he is a big man of history.

But, save for a brief sweetheart snapshot at a kissing booth, we can’t see him, not yet. Bear in mind, the majority of the film will take place in the sick agrarian landscape of Nickel Academy, where Elwood will eventually be sent, but it is in the rarified period of its early section that we feel undone. With the P.O.V.—a kind of anachronism for this period piece, as it is the perspective of our cell-phone era—Ross and Fray break out of the rote rules of representation politics. “Nickel Boys” “goes dark,” to borrow from the thematic schema of “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,” a recent show at the Guggenheim featuring paintings that obscured the contemporary figure. It feels like a risk, both from a viewing and filmmaking perspective. In some scenes, in which an actor is speaking to Elwood, one assumes that the actor may have been speaking directly to the camera. Sometimes we feel the absence of a real person receiving the dialogue. But isn’t it the project of the film to make that camera, as with Diop and her sculpture, speak to the history of cinema it witnessed throughout the century?

“Making our race proud, boy.” That’s what the slick dude with the conk and the blue Pontiac says to Elwood, who is hitching a ride to get to college. Elwood has been admitted to a free program for gifted Black students. Before he can get there, though, the police pull the men over. The Pontiac was stolen. Instead of showing the arrest and the ensuing trial, Ross reinvents how we see violence. He “plays” the opening scene of “The Defiant Ones,” Stanley Kramer’s 1958 odd couple movie of race and reconciliation, in which two convicts, Tony Curtis’s white John (Joker) Jackson and Sidney Poitier’s Noah Cullen, escape a chain gang, still chained to each other. James Baldwin once wrote that Kramer’s film dies on the screen for Black audiences. The ending, of Noah sacrificing his freedom for old Joker, has no veracity for us. We watch the face of Poitier, and know that he knows what his character cannot know. Acting and being—the Black performer presents the paradox in full in much of American film. Kramer’s flick acts more as a documentary than as a fiction in Ross’s hands, a documentary about the bind of acting when the face is so present, the horizon of meaning. You think a lot about genre film, watching “Nickel Boys”—those Westerns and prison-escape tales that had some boys win and some boys die.

Elwood ends up at Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory. There, his world is both opened up and asphyxiated. The white boys stay up the hill in well-attended quarters. They get to play football. In their white tees and jeans, they resemble James Deans. The Black boys are dressed in tattered linens—psychological costuming for a different role. There is an evil theatricality to the society, segregated by race and sex, a patriarchy at its purest. Hamish Linklater, playing Spencer, the white warden, delineates a behavioral scale by which the boys might “graduate” from Nickel and return to their families, should their families still have them. The “house father,” a Black man, is no refuge, an overseer in a starched suit. The “school” is a front for an operation by which the state of Florida extracts slave labor from the condemned boys. No one has the boys’ back, not the Black or white administrators, who rig boxing matches to profit off them further. At night, Spencer takes boys to a shed, where they are beaten. The boys at Nickel speak plainly about the dumping ground for peers that go missing, called Boot Hill.

An extraordinary scene of mirroring takes place not too long after Elwood is shuttled to Nickel. In the cafeteria, the boys jeer at him, and a light-skinned kid, off to the side, jeers back, an act Elwood takes as fraternal defense. The light-skinned kid, Turner (Brandon Wilson), rebuffs Elwood’s gesture in response, thinking him presumptuous or fey, probably. But they start talking. And then the scene plays again, only from the perspective of Turner. We can see Elwood now, but from the perspective of a stranger. There seems to be a glitch, in the misalignment of Elwood’s well-appointed English and his character’s slump, his restrained air of defeat. It’s a phenomenal moment, seeing Elwood like that, as he wouldn’t have liked to be seen.

Turner and Elwood become inseparable, and the film continues to switch between their perspectives. Their intimacy is both real and conceptual. Turner is a city cat, street-smart. He is savvy enough to have secured an off-campus gig with Harper (Fred Hechinger), a white employee of Nickel, who gives him a cut of their spoils. Turner sees Nickel as an inescapable fate. Elwood, meanwhile, is righteous, moved to action; even as the injustice at Nickel drowns him. In a devastating sequence, Turner watches Elwood become possessed: on one of their off-campus gigs, Elwood believes he has seen King and bolts toward him, risking traffic. It’s only a cardboard cutout, a dark joke, and a harbinger of how rectitude has, Turner seems to think, messed with Elwood’s good sense. Elwood thinks that the wave of civil-rights reform will come to the abandoned boys, picking oranges under the oppressive Florida heat. He takes it upon himself to document their experiences in a notebook. Turner secretly admires Elwood, but he doesn’t say so, as the abandonment of his world view would introduce a vulnerability he can’t take. Turner’s a repeat at Nickel. “Out there and in here, it’s the same,” he says to Elwood, to cure him, perhaps, of his dangerous idealism. The introduction of Turner and his jadedness reveals the edge to Herisse’s Elwood, who’s got a hauteur to him.

Whitehead’s original novel, “The Nickel Boys,” is based on first-person accounts from survivors of the abuse at the Dozier School for Boys, now shuttered. I worked hard to connect emotionally to the book but felt thwarted. I struggled to get a sense of Elwood’s and Turner’s personalities, overwhelmed by the book’s sense of restitutive purpose. The book does not flinch, as book critics say, from the violence the characters endure in order to facilitate our bearing of witness. But how is the trauma processed in the moment? Where do the eyes go? In Ross’s vision, no less excruciating, the reception of violence—and violence itself—is made visually oblique. Elwood’s idealism gets him in trouble. Stolen from the night by Spencer, he waits for his turn in the buck-breaking ceremony. The camera turns away, and toward the archive. The awful crack of a whip, obscured by a mind-melting roar, backgrounds a litany of black-and-white photographs, of young men who were tortured at the Dozier School. All throughout the film, the archive surfaces, of documentary footage not only of the real-life Nickel but also of the twentieth century churning on, with its marathons and its space races, as forgotten children tried to survive. I am reminded of Tina M. Campt’s thinking in “A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See,” about collage as an art form. Campt gives us a frame she calls “reassemblage in dispossession.” What some will feel as the amorphous “artiness” of “Nickel Boys” is no excess; reassemblage is the only way Ross could present his plot.

“Plot”—that word becomes increasingly less apt to describe the substance of the film as it goes on. “Nickel Boys” is a fractal, necklacing images of minute daily survival, as well as narratives of our history and of our present. And yet Elwood and Turner experience Nickel as an acute narrative dilemma, the dilemma of their lives. How to solve it? Elwood and Nana try the system, mounting a legal appeal, and the system robs them. Desperate, Turner and Elwood come together, abandoning the scripts they had inherited. In other words, they embark on creating an image new to them, of fugitivity and of freedom. They thief the night. In their crouches, we are reminded of the silhouettes of a century’s worth of outlaw men. The markers of the classic cinema escape: the open road, the bicycle, the dawning sun, illuminating everybody.

Without giving away the ending of the film, a shocking twist that jolts us back into the realm of entertainment, I can say that a major theme in the resolution of “Nickel Boys” is authorship. Not all of “Nickel Boys” is shot in the first person, nor is it all linear. There is another perspective that feels disruptive, off-key, involving a character played by Daveed Diggs. It would require sporting on his back a kind of rig. An older man, named Elwood Curtis, as we can see from his moving-company business card, has been living a life, all the while journeying through the seventies, the early millennium, the Black Lives Matter present. He is on the Internet, piecing together the trauma wrought on him at Nickel. And who is it that is watching him? Is it the view of gods, history, or a ghost? Is it us? ♦