The New Yorker:

RaMell Ross’s first dramatic feature, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, gives the bearing of witness an arresting cinematic form.

By Richard Brody

It’s harder to adapt a great book than an average one. Literary greatness often inhibits directors, who end up paying prudent homage to the source rather than engaging in the bold revisions that successful adaptations require. And even uninhibited directors may lack the stylistic originality of their literary heroes. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that the director RaMell Ross, in his first dramatic feature, “Nickel Boys”—adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel, “The Nickel Boys”—avoids both obstacles with a rare blend of daring and ingenuity. Few films have ever rendered a major work of fiction so innovatively yet so faithfully. In a year of audaciously accomplished movies, “Nickel Boys” stands out as different in kind. Ross, who co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes, achieves an advance in narrative form, one that singularly befits the movie’s subject—not just dramatically but historically and morally, too.

The movie’s title refers to Black youths (teens and younger) who are inmates of the Nickel Academy, a segregated and abusive “reform school” in rural northern Florida—particularly to two teen-agers, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who become friends while incarcerated there, in the mid-nineteen-sixties. (The institution in Whitehead’s novel is inspired by the notorious Dozier School for Boys, but his characters are fictional.) Elwood, who is sixteen years old when he enters the facility, is being raised by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who works on the cleaning staff of a hotel. He’s a star student, literary and politically passionate, in a segregated school. One of his teachers, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), is a civil-rights activist, and he plays a Martin Luther King, Jr., speech on a record for his students.

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