[Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios]

Movie Review: Nickel Boys

07:00 January 21, 2025
By: Fritz Esker

Nickel Boys (2025)

There's a great quote about moviegoing that says, "There are movies to admire and movies to love. If you're lucky, they're one and the same." Nickel Boys is a movie that's admirable in many ways, but the stylistic tics will keep some viewers at arm's length from what should be a grueling, emotional story.

Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a studious, idealistic Black teen growing up in late-1960s Florida. He is enrolled in classes at a new university that provides promising high schoolers with college credit. To get to the school, he hitches a ride in a car that turns out to be stolen, so he is sent to the Nickel Academy (based on the real-life Dozier School).

The Nickel Academy is segregated, and, for the Black students, it is essentially a prison. They work long hours of manual labor and are physically abused by the adults and the other students. Amidst the daily suffering, Elwood befriends another inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson).

Director Ramell Ross shoots the film almost entirely through POV shots from the perspective of Elwood or Turner. Some of these shots are quite beautiful. There are also multiple flashes forward in time showing one of the young men as an adult. While this is formally daring and definitely makes Nickel Boys stand out—whatever its flaws, this does not feel like a film that came off an assembly line. Ross' staging can also be a bit disorienting at times. Some key events are only alluded to via dialogue instead of shown on screen. So, at times, it struggles to grab the viewer by the throat the way it should with such gut-wrenching content.

Nickel Boys was shot in LaPlace, Hammond, and Ponchatoula. There is also Oscar buzz around it, including for Best Picture, but nomination announcements have been delayed due to the wildfires in Los Angeles.

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