Nickel Boys
2024 · RaMell Ross
Chronicles the powerful friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.
dir. RaMell Ross · 2024
RaMell Ross came to fiction from photography and the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and he adapted Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel about a Florida reform school — modeled on the real Dozier School for Boys, whose unmarked graves were exhumed decades after it closed — with an audacity almost no American studio-adjacent film attempts. With cinematographer Jomo Fray, Ross shoots nearly everything through the eyes of his two young protagonists: the frame holds only what Elwood or Turner sees — a grandmother's embrace, an orange rolling across a table, sunlight through Spanish moss. What might have been a stunt becomes an ethic, insisting that a history of racial terror be registered through attention and tenderness rather than spectacle, the texture of Black life in the Jim Crow South accruing shot by shot. Archival fragments — rocket launches, newsreels, photographs — drift in like involuntary memory. A Best Picture nominee, it stands as one of the decade's genuine formal reinventions of the prestige drama, and the rare literary adaptation that answers a great novel with an equally radical grammar of its own.
Lines of influence
- Lady in the Lake (1947) — The earliest feature to sustain a strict first-person subjective camera for its whole length, with the protagonist glimpsed only in mirrors — the exact optical premise Ross revives for Elwood and Turner.
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) — Locks the lens to one character's literal eyeline — including blinks, tears, and out-of-focus blur — modeling how a bodily point-of-view can carry a whole narrative of confinement.
- Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) — Ross's own documentary grammar of elliptical time, ground-level embodied framing, and the Black Southern gaze as lyric rather than reportage is the direct method he adapts into fiction here.
- Daughters of the Dust (1991) — Non-linear ancestral memory rendered through tableau composition and voice-over that speaks across generations — a template for treating Black Southern history as remembered image rather than plot.
- The Tree of Life (2011) — Roving low-angle handheld that hovers at a child's height, whispered interior voice, and memory assembled as impressionistic fragments — the subjective-camera lyricism Fray and Ross openly extend.
- Killer of Sheep (1978) — Neorealist observational poetry that finds meaning in the incidental textures of Black working-class life, establishing the durational, unhurried attention Ross applies to Nickel Academy.
- La Jetée (1962) — Builds memory and trauma almost entirely from static images and montage, the essay-film logic behind Ross's interpolation of still and archival material into the fiction.
- Medium Cool (1969) — Splices staged drama into real documentary footage of civil unrest, the archival-montage seam Ross uses to bind Jim Crow reality to his invented characters.
- Sans Soleil (1983) — An essayistic weave of found imagery, memory, and second-person narration that legitimizes montage as a way of thinking about history rather than illustrating it.
- All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) — Shot by the same DP, Jomo Fray, sharing his tactile skin-close sensory framing and fragmented, non-linear approach to Black Southern memory.
- Moonlight (2016) — Jenkins (a producer here) pioneered the direct-to-lens gaze and saturated intimate close-up that Nickel Boys pushes to a full first-person address.
- Enter the Void (2009) — Governs its entire form with a disembodied floating first-person POV, proving the subjective camera can be a structural principle rather than a gimmick shot.
- 12 Years a Slave (2013) — Adapts a first-person testimony of racial captivity using unbroken durational takes that force the viewer to hold the gaze on violence — a kindred ethics of looking.
- Under the Skin (2013) — Constructs a non-human subjectivity purely through formal camera restriction and altered perception, the same reinvention-of-viewpoint project Ross undertakes.
- Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) — Anchors its Southern world to a child's-eye handheld POV and mythic voice-over, sharing Nickel Boys' ground-level embodied perspective on a young Black protagonist.
- The Inspection (2022) — Also lensed by Jomo Fray, it applies his intimate, expressionistic close-quarters camera to institutional dehumanization of a young Black man.
Appears in courses