RaMell Ross Breaks Free of Reform-School Tropes

From “Boy A” (the movie that launched Andrew Garfield’s career) to “Zero for Conduct,” movies set in broken boarding schools and juvenile reformatory centers are a dime a dozen. With “Nickel Boys,” director RaMell Ross finds fresh colors in such a rigidly codified genre, turning a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem. The book by Colson Whitehead is brilliant, but much of it you’ve probably seen before on-screen, so Ross strips away as many of the words as possible, searching instead for images to tell the story of Elwood, a Tallahassee teen who’s so much more than a victim of the system.

Except, Ross doesn’t tell the story so much as inhabit it, to the extent I found myself wondering whether I could have followed the plot — which alternates between the 1960s and the early 2000s — had I not already read Whitehead’s novel. (I suspect that will pose a challenge for others, who should take the unconventional form as an invitation to look beyond the plot for other ways of participating in Elwood’s experience.) For the first hour or so, “Nickel Boys” feels like the most exciting narrative debut since “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Then Ross tries something bold that doesn’t quite work, and the experiment collapses upon itself.

Building on the promise of 2018’s Oscar-nominated essay-doc “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” Ross presents “Nickel Boys” as a series of first-person impressions: evocative sense memories from Elwood’s childhood, education and adolescent activism, crushed but not killed by unjust incarceration. The film puts us in Elwood’s place — it is his POV that Ross privileges — using a variation on the style Terrence Malick pioneered with “The Tree of Life” to foster empathy.

Looking out at the world through Elwood’s eyes, we see our surroundings, not the color of his skin. We feel others’ gaze on us, and we’re told when to avert our own, at which point, the camera pans down, as if to avoid being beaten for insubordination. Only rarely does Elwood actually appear, reflected in a bus window or captured by the flash of a photo booth.

Among those who acknowledge Elwood’s existence, some see potential — like Elwood’s teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), who gives the boy a pamphlet for Melvin Griggs College, as well as a record of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches — while others are determined to limit it. There’s an unmistakable innocence to early scenes, as Elwood is “created equal,” in the country’s own words, only to be taught otherwise by 1960s Florida society. Through it all, the boy never forgets MLK’s words about turning “the capacity to suffer” into a weapon against oppression.

In one early, essential shot, Elwood sits at the kitchen table while his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) prepares a meal. His gaze drifts to the fridge, where Mr. Hill’s brochure slides slowly toward the floor — a metaphor for what will become of that opportunity in his life. Elwood is headed to Melvin Griggs when he gets in the wrong car. It’s a stolen Impala, and though Elwood was just hitching a ride, the white authorities want to teach him a lesson, so Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy.

For a short time, Elwood thinks he can continue his education there, but this institution is no school; it’s an illegally segregated penal system where the boys spend long hours working, or else doing “community service” (the administration’s name for selling to local businesses the supplies meant for students). Nearly a century after slavery was abolished, the community uses this loophole to exploit free Black labor.

In writing “Nickel Boys,” Whitehead was inspired by the Dozier School for Boys, whose scandalous treatment of Black students resulted in more than 100 deaths (the undeclared graves were discovered years after “Nickel Boys” is set). Whitehead, who also wrote “The Underground Railroad,” describes the sort of otherwise-untold abuse that must have occurred at Dozier in his novel, and another filmmaker surely would have done the same in adapting it. But not Ross. Too many movies have already trod that ground, from Alan Clarke’s merciless “Scum” to Barry Levinson’s more sentimental “Sleepers.”

Such films were important in their time, but nearly all hit the same notes — merciless beatings, solitary confinement, homosexual molesting and a death (by suicide or murder) that finally attracts outside scrutiny — until they became clichés. Ross has no intention of repeating them here, banishing such aspects between the lines or beyond the edges of the frame.

Once Elwood reaches the Nickel Academy, something miraculous happens. As a boy, he had felt alone in this world, but at Nickel, he finally sees in someone else a reflection of himself — a notion that Ross interprets a bit too literally, breaking the strict subjectivity of Elwood’s experience and leaping across the cafeteria table to Turner (Brandon Wilson), a lighter-skinned kid his age. Ross replays the scene from Turner’s perspective, and from this point on, we’re able to see Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse) via his newfound friend, as the film slips between their two POVs.

This formal shift solves one of the film’s limitations until this point: As viewers, we want to see the human face, and Ross has deprived us of this until now (why some audiences are frustrated by the Dardenne brothers’ films, where so much time is spent staring at the back of people’s heads). Ross intends for us to identify with Elwood, but a century of cinema has trained us to do that by looking at his eyes, rather than through them. Now, with the addition of Turner, we can finally study Elwood’s facial expressions — though I found them sorely lacking.

In reality, most people mask their emotions. While actors have tricks for inviting us inside their characters’ heads, Herisse plays Elwood as mostly inscrutable, his poker face hiding the young man’s recalcitrant idealism — a key dimension of his personality in the book, left largely unspoken here. But Ross has another reason for so radically rewriting cinematic grammar in this case, though it may spoil the twist to reveal it here. Suffice to say, the future is not what is appears, and Ross has reasons for hiding the film’s biggest star, Daveed Diggs (seen only from behind).

Like “Moonlight” before it, Whitehead’s novel is split into three distinct periods. It’s conceivable that Ross could have found a way to make his adaptation every bit as powerful. Instead, “Nickel Boys” unravels as its multiple perspectives and timelines blur, getting lost in digressions — from archival footage of NASA missions to forensic excavations at Nickel Academy. You could read the boys’ fate as tragedy, though the film intends it as transference. Seems the students learned something there after all.