Critic Reviews

Ross, honoring the perspective shift that characterizes Whitehead’s novel, switches between Elwood and Turner’s points of view, remaining, at all times, in the subjective mode. The commitment to this way of storytelling imbues Nickel Boy with an overwhelming intimacy and becomes another way that Ross, as a filmmaker, stretches what it means to represent Black people.

Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’ documentary work, Nickel Boys so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth.

Nickel Boys is about societal evil, certainly, and carries a score which almost bites the skin of the audience as a reminder of that pain, but it is the tenderness at its core that deals the emotional blow.

This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.

In finding a new way to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross changes the way we perceive the world itself.

A clear masterpiece held together by visual splendor and idiosyncratic performances.

It feels alive like an open, bleeding heart. It’s a tragic story told with hope that doesn’t ring saccharine or overwrought. Sometimes it moves like water, flowing from ugliness to beauty. There are few American films that come close to what it accomplishes, as either film or adaptation. Nickel Boys suggests a miracle, with the makings of a classic.

It’s a movie that is not only worth returning to again and again, but one you will be grateful to have walking alongside you for years to come.

Part of what makes Nickel Boys striking is how Ross stays true to the novel but with his own voice, his own narrative and visual style, and how he uses moments in time and freighted images — faces, hands, flashing police lights, an alligator in a class, a mule in a hall — to build the story.

The threads do come together, but it requires a bit of patience and giving yourself over to the film, which is both formally and emotionally eye-opening. Adapting great literature can sometimes send filmmakers running towards the conventional; Thank goodness Ross charted his own path instead.