Best-Picture nominee Nickel Boys brings the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel about youth detention to life

LaMarr Rucker's bold and emotionally resonant adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, *The Nickel Boys*, pushes the boundaries of perspective in film. It is formally daring and emotionally jarring, challenging the traditional notions of how audiences see the world through the eyes of others in the cinematic medium.

The film challenges our understanding of empathy. How much can we truly see, even when things are right in front of us? Whitehead's 2019 novel, written in the first person, provides a profound depiction of a notorious reform school for boys in 1960s Florida.

*The Nickel Boys* retains this perspective, filming entirely from the protagonist's point of view, eliminating any pretense of camera "objectivity" and suggesting that the characters are the authors of their own stories. This bold and potentially claustrophobic design forces the viewer into an inseparable, subjective perspective with the characters, devoid of the third-person distance or the comforting detachment often found in dramatic films.

The effect is both direct and disorienting. In a sense, it's remarkably similar to the first-person perspectives prevalent in online video content, XR, and gaming – a clever strategy that reactivates history through a sharp, contemporary lens. The film opens as if putting on a virtual reality headset, presenting the perspective of young Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), who gazes up at the sky while lying in the backyard he shares with his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in Tallahassee, Florida.

The film poetically showcases childhood scenes from the early 1960s – jungle gyms, tooth extractions, Martin Luther King Jr. smiling on a store television – which gradually blend into impressions of adolescence – lovers in a photo booth, the space race on the news, the segregation of the American South. Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a gifted student of 17, is preparing to begin a scholarship program at a technical school when he is implicated as an accomplice for riding in a stolen vehicle – a promising life abruptly cut short by a moment of racial profiling.

He is sent to the Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school where white children engage in sports while Black children – if they are not being brutally beaten by teachers – are forced into prison labor or participate in boxing matches for prize money. Here, Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), a teenager from Texas whose worldview is diametrically opposed to Elwood's idealism.

"The game's always rigged, the rules are already set," Turner tells him. "It's not the same as it used to be," Elwood replies, "We can change things." Elwood's perspective is so immersive – so inescapable – that it takes a moment to realize when the film abruptly switches to Turner's perspective, and what might have initially been perceived as a stylistic gimmick begins to reveal a more complex and elusive approach.

Concurrently, Rucker intersperses archival news footage, vintage home movies, and clips from the 1958 Hollywood race drama *The Defiant Ones* – with Sidney Poitier locked in a prison truck – reminiscent of the compelling collages in his breakthrough Oscar-nominated documentary *Hale County This Morning, This Evening* (2018). When Elwood is sent to be whipped by a teacher, the film cuts from explicit scenes of violence to a series of black-and-white images depicting students at the historical Dozier School for Boys – the notorious real-life Florida reform school that served as Whitehead's inspiration for Nickel Academy.

This moment triggers an ambitious leap forward in time to 2018, where an older Elwood (now played by Daveed Diggs) clicks through a series of chilling images on his computer desktop, playing amateur detective in historical archives. In these future scenes, spanning the 70s, 80s, and 2010s, the camera is mounted behind Elwood's head, moving as he moves. It's an unusual, disembodied perspective, perhaps suggesting a ghost of sorts is tracking Elwood – an effect eerily reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh's recent film *Presence*, a ghost story about very different traumas.

If *The Nickel Boys* is a film haunted by the ghosts of the past, its stylistic achievement lies not in reactivating history, but in allowing it to breathe vividly in the present – to examine the perspectives on gazing, and what we bring as viewers. Just as the film invites us to experience and empathize with the lives of Elwood and Turner, it also challenges our ability to truly experience the life of another.

In any case, as *The Nickel Boys* reaches its transcendent, almost cosmic conclusion – ultimately suggesting liberation from our myopic worldview – it is impossible not to be moved by its emotional impact. Do not miss it.