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Nickel Boys Movie Review

Nickel Boys is a 2024 historical drama film directed by RaMell Ross and starring Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson. It’s a very intriguing, though flawed experiment.

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“I know my mother loved me.

She just loved liquor more“

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It follows the powerful friendship between two young black men navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida back in the sixties. Based on the book of the same name, the film apparently is faithful to its source material, but stylistically it is something completely different from anything that we’ve seen before.

You’d think that they would have done this approach earlier, but it very rarely happened, and certainly never in such a long movie and throughout its entire runtime. Yes, Nickel Boys was shot in the first-person perspective. This means that we very rarely see the two protagonists (we only see them when they are together in one place naturally), but we mostly just hear their voices and see their hands etc.

This approach was a double-edged sword – it made the movie unique and interesting, but also somewhat emotionally distant and certainly the characterization and the acting of the two main figures was quite weak because of this choice. Others fared much better, especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in such a powerful supporting turn that stole the movie from everybody else. I loved her heartwarming speeches and radiant smile. Her scenes were the heart of the picture for me.

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But the choice to structure the film in such a way as to give us the perspectives of both of these two young men was ultimately a solid one as it gave us at least some development for them both, not to mention it finally let us see them from the other boy’s perspective. But had they been better realized overall, the movie would have been much more emotionally impactful.

But going back to this groundbreaking cinematography, Nickel Boys doesn’t exactly look like a first-person video game, which I feared it would become, but more so its own thing. The focus changes throughout, the camera movements are consistently innovative, and the shaky cam is thankfully used minimally. The highlight for me was seeing the minute details that all spring from this unique approach – the hands of the main characters, the fabric of the clothes when they hug another person etc. These small details made the movie truly something special.

When it comes to the story, this is a familiar tale that is enlivened by its superb editing, an interesting structure and unforgettable cinematography, but at its core it’s your standard tale of injustice and fighting for the freedom of minorities. The footage of MLK and films on television screens was overwhelming, but at least fitting the time period and themes well. The directing from RaMell Ross is very strong, making for a promising debut. The movie is overlong for sure and I respected it more than I liked it, but the power of its unique cinematic language is pretty much undeniable.

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