‘Nickel Boys’ Opens NYFF 2024 62nd Edition

“Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross‘s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, opened New York Film Festival’s 62nd edition on Friday night. The historical drama, which received rave reviews out of Telluride in September, marks the Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker’s narrative debut.

On a muggy, overcast evening in the Upper West Side, Ross and the film’s stars — including Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Daveed Diggs — walked the carpet at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall before introducing the film to the nearly-packed theater.

“You can feel the energy, it’s like Michael Jordan is in the arena,” Ross told Variety ahead of the screening. “It feels like something crazy is gonna happen in there.”

“Emotional” might be a more apt descriptor of the screening experience. The two-and-a-half-hour film follows two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow-era Florida. Herisse and Wilson play Elwood and Turner, whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th century.

“All of RaMell’s work — as a photographer, a documentarian, a writer, an essayist — is engaged in the search for new ways of seeing, encountering and understanding the world,” NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim said in his opening remarks from stage.

NYFF chairman Daniel Stern echoed these sentiments, adding that he and the team always choose a film that they feel reflect that year’s state of cinema, and the world at large. The Nickel Boys’ tragic story, he said, felt prescient given the “state of turmoil” the world finds itself in today.

After the screening, guests made their way to Central Park for the annual afterparty at Tavern on the Green.

The opening was a full-circle moment for many of the film’s cast members who are New York natives and remember looking up to NYFF as the pinnacle of the festival circuit.

When asked how he felt to not only be at NYFF, but to be starring in the festival’s opening film, Herisse only had two words: “Pinch me!”