Nickel Boys, a film by Ramell Ross at Picturehouse at FACT, Liverpool

The film has received multiple awards, including the National (US) Society of Film Critics Best Film of 2024. It is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead, which I read a few years ago. 

The film tells the story of a teenage Black boy, Elwood Curtis, played by Ethan Harisse, who, in 1960s Florida, manages to navigate the racial prejudice to gain a place at a college. On his way there, he accepts a lift from a stranger, who, it turns out, is driving a stolen car.  Elwood is wrongly convicted of being an accomplice to the theft and is sent to a notoriously violent and abusive young offenders’ institution, the Nickel Academy.  While the white boys sent there are treated well and receive an education, the black boys are segregated to inferior accommodation and are subjected to beatings and abuse by the white officials. 

A moving subplot is the attempt by Elwood’s grandmother to organise an appeal against his conviction, but the money she pays to a solicitor is embezzled and she is unsuccessful. Also alongside the main story we see Elwood several years later as a successful business person in a relationship but still obsessed with the revelation of unmarked graves of boys being discovered on the Nickel Academy grounds.

Elwood separates himself from the other inmates and, as a result, is bullied and ostracised. He makes friends with one other inmate, Turner, and the two support each other.  Elwood takes notes of what happens with a view to revealing it to the authorities, but when he does so no action is taken and Elwood is convinced that he will be beaten to death, as has happened to other boys who even inadvertently challenged the system. He and Turner plan to escape before this happens.  They steal bicycles but are unable to flee from the guards, who chase them in a van.  Turner manages to escape but Elwood, weakened from a previous beating, is shot and killed. 

At the end, we see Turner visiting Elwood’s Gran and being hugged by her as if he was her grandson.  In a way that remains enigmatic in the film, but is explained in the book, Turner goes on to take Elwood’s identity and to campaign for civil rights and justice for the victims of the Academy. 

The film takes this relatively straightforward story and presents it in a very sophisticated way.  The main dramatic episodes are interspersed randomly with shots of political events of the 1960s.  The filming technique is quite unique: we see and listen to each of the main characters as if we in the audience were the other one and in several places, it is unclear which boy we are; their identities seem to be interchangeable.  This is clearly a way of leading to the ultimate taking on of Elwood’s identity by Turner in later years. This is clever film-making but quite challenging, particularly as the dialogue is delivered in a Florida teenage drawl that is often quite unintelligible; it would have been good to have seen the film with subtitles because, while not all the dialogue was essential, understanding more of it would have removed some of the confusion about the identities. I’ll definitely try to watch it again when it appears with text.  5*