Review: Nickel Boys (2024)

 

I would like to review RaMell Ross' "Nickel Boys" now that I'm done sobbing, but I hesitate because explaining a major part of why the film is so powerful might spoil it a bit.

Let me just say that:

1. This is a film about Black struggle, about Jim Crow, about institutional abuse, about corruption, and about child slavery in 1960s Florida.

2. This is a film about selfless love, about sacrificial love, about friendship, about family, about trust, about truth, about identity, about agency.

3. This is a immensely confident film that asks a lot of its audiences, in that it is told in first person, that faces are often not shown, that it treats Florida's infamous Dozier School for Boys in a fictionalized and sometimes dreamlike manner, that many critical narrative sequences — including one at the heart of the story — are not performed at all but instead are described by still shots of exhumed artifacts and clips of documentary films, and that its one of those movies that you immediately want to watch again once you catch on to what it is telling you.

4. This is one of my favorite movies of this decade, and it rightly received its Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is beyond my comprehension that it was not also nominated for directing, editing, cinematography, sound, and supporting actress for Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

5. This is a film that presents acts of enormous depravity and cruelty but instead of showing them head on, we instead hear them offscreen, or are shown their torn edges, or made to sit in the shadows they cast. Somehow this never seems like an attempt to sanitize or soften them, but instead somehow lets us feel them by surprise. It's not exactly the same method as was used in "The Zone Of Interest," but it has some of the same eerie effects.

Highly recommended, but you're gonna get torn up. Still in cinemas and now available for purchase on Prime Video.