Page to screen: The Nickel Boys

Hindustan Times

13-05-2025

Subjugation, not education, is the cornerstone of Nickel Academy, a reform school for young offenders in America's Jim Crow South. Crushing the spirit overrides igniting the minds of Black students kept separate and unequal on campus. The default language spoken by the staff is violence. As a fresh-faced idealist shaped by Martin Luther King's sermons about loving your oppressor and breaking down racial barriers with non-violence learns, 'violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.' Colson Whitehead modelled the fictional reformatory of his 2019 novel The Nickel Boys on Dozier School, a Florida institution that closed in 2011 after operating for more than a century despite repeated allegations of beatings, rape, forced labour and murder at the hands of staff. Dozens of boys are estimated to have died on campus grounds with three times as many black victims as white. As of 2019, 82 unmarked graves had been found.
The anonymity of the black youth who suffered endless abuse at Dozier led Whitehead to imagine their untold stories in The Nickel Boys, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a life-changing friendship between two boys, Elwood and Turner, hoping to survive a school of horrors. Whitehead presents the sickening reality of everyday life in Nickel with a thoughtful restraint. Not one to lay it on thick, he is forensic with his prose whether describing a young Elwood playing games with the kitchen staff at the hotel where his nana works, his after-school job at a convenience store or the systemic cruelties at Nickel. Maintaining a plainspoken tone throughout lends a devastating weight to the story as it progresses. While walking to college for his first day of classes, Elwood unknowingly hitchhikes with a man driving a stolen car and gets sentenced to Nickel. At first glance, Nickel looks innocuous with its manicured green lawns and red-brick buildings, like the college he almost went to or any other. The grisly truth reveals itself once he is directed to the black side of the campus.
Just as Whitehead keeps the violence largely off page in the novel, RaMell Ross keeps it off frame in his blistering film adaptation. It is hidden away in the edges and shadows of subjectivity. Cries of students savagely beaten at night are masked by the drones of an industrial fan. When Elwood (Ethan Herisse) sees a young boy being harassed by two bullies in the dormitory bathroom, he intervenes — a gesture that earns all four a visit to the torture chamber. There, each student is flogged with a leather strap by the white superintendent Spencer (Hamish Linklater). The camera, standing in for the darting eyes of a nervous Elwood waiting for his turn, glances at a Bible on a nearby table and his restless legs. Ross doesn't show the flogging. Instead, he cuts to fuzzy stills of Dozier boys from the archives. The distorted images of real lives folded into fiction serve to challenge the sanitising of history while condemning the violence of erasure.
Where the book is written in the third person, the film is shot almost entirely from a first-person vantage. We are thrust into the film with the camera aligned with the subjective perspectives of Elwood and Turner. We are invited to inhabit their perspectives, see what they see, hear what they hear, fear what they fear, and experience the terror of their everyday life and the poetry of their resilience. It is a formal choice purposed to untether blackness from an essentialised mode of looking, to reclaim black stories from white imaginations. And it shifts the very nature of how we engage with the film, from passive spectators to active witnesses. The stakes feel immediate and enveloping as we are kept rooted in a limited subjectivity and refused the respite of blinking at the horrors. Images of violence against black bodies have been historically refracted through the depersonalising, voyeuristic lenses of white image-makers. In reimagining Whitehead's novel, Ross takes Toni Morrison's advice: 'Take away the gaze of the white male. Once you take that out, the whole world opens up.'
Abandoned by his parents, Elwood grew up with his nana Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in segregated Tallahassee. He is a diligent student, loves reading encyclopaedias and plans to go to college. When he gets a Dr King record for Christmas, it awakens a strong belief in justice and civil rights. In the film, a young Elwood is introduced to Dr King when he sees the 'How Long, Not Long' speech on a TV through a store display window – where we also catch a teasing glimpse of Elwood in the reflection. Our first view of him in the full comes when he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson) at the cafeteria table in Nickel. The point of view switches from Elwood's to Turner's with the same scene playing from both their perspectives to contrast their dispositions. Turner is the sceptical pragmatist to Elwood's naive idealist. The key to surviving Nickel is no different to surviving outside, Turner tells Elwood. 'You gotta watch how people act. What they do. And then try to figure out how to get around them, like an obstacle course.' Navigating the obstacle course together puts Turner's honed every-man-for-himself instincts to the test. When Elwood is recovering from his beatings in the infirmary, Turner eats soap powder to make himself sick and join him. Riding out the sentence is easier said than done when at the mercy of a sadist like Spencer. But the pair's bond grants them the courage to dream of an escape out of Nickel.
The film centres Elwood and Turner's shared destiny without forgoing any aspects of the brutal conditions that birth their alliance. That separate is inherently unequal is evidenced by the frayed clothes black students are given, the unpaid jobs they are coerced into and the brutality they are subjected to. When a black boy misunderstands the staff's instructions to tank a rigged game against a white opponent, he is beaten to death for insubordination. Abuse is so normalised it is spoken of in euphemisms. The torture chamber is nicknamed 'the white house' by the black boys and 'the ice cream factory' by the white boys limping out with multi-coloured bruises. 'A date on Lovers' Lane' suggests rape. 'Community service' refers to a door-to-door facility provided to local businessmen who pay Nickel a tidy sum for the supplies meant for black students. This vile enterprise is made doubly so by the fact that Turner and Elwood are enlisted to help the white student Harper (Fred Hechinger) on his delivery assignments in town. Leaving school grounds allows the two to taste the brief but sweet joy of freedom. But the potential consequences if the two, as opposed to Harper, were to give in to the temptation to escape underlines the power asymmetry of segregation. The doctrine of separate but equal is further complicated at Nickel by Jamie, a student of Mexican descent who keeps getting tossed back and forth between the black and white sides of the school because the staff can't seem to agree on where he belongs.
When Elwood and Turner converse, the boomeranging POVs resemble a shot/reverse shot. The fluidity of the camerawork ensures we are never taken out of the story. The camera becoming the eyes of Elwood and Turner doesn't mean it moves and blinks like the human eye. Instead of an accurate simulation of 20/20 vision, Ross opts for a more lyrical approximation that stays true to the story's emotional scope. The leads performing with a camera rigged to their bodies or performing with a camera as scene partner doesn't rob the film of its gravity. It simply puts the emphasis on the power of perspective over the strength of performance.
If the novel opens with an exhumation of bodies in the present, the film opens with an evocation of memories from the past: oranges dangle from a tree in the warm breeze of sunny Florida; below a hand strokes the grass in a yard; a gentle voice beckons a young Elwood to come inside. Light, sensory details and impressionist touches give vivid shape to memories, be it condensation on a beer can from the time Elwood's parents played cards with friends or nana icing a cake. Ross adds his own poetic flourishes to enrich his POV conceit: pencils drop from the ceiling in a magical moment when a Dr King speech is played in class; sparks from a pick-up truck dragging a crucifix along the road and cameos from stray alligators heighten the hellish nightmare of Nickel.
The first-person perspective flips to third when the film flashes forward from the events at Nickel to an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) living with his girlfriend, running a moving company and growing old in New York. It's as if he had to become a whole different person to survive. The camera stays over the shoulder of a man who has dissociated to keep the past in the past but remains haunted by the spectre of trauma. Limiting the POV to the third person allowed Whitehead to withhold the big reveal at the end. Oscillating between dual perspectives and between the past and present doesn't soften the weight of the reveal in the film. But the reveal itself shouldn't surprise alert viewers. As for the truth about Nickel, it doesn't come out until the 2010s when unmarked graves are discovered on the site where the reformatory once stood and now an office park is to be built by a real estate developer. A shocking atrocity is but a cause of annoyance for the developer.
Like Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Nickel Boys is a saga about escaping Deep South captivity, informed by real-life atrocities American history would rather sweep under the rug. That Elwood and Turner come up against horrors Cora and Cesar were subjected to a century before attests to how little had changed. The ghosts of the injustices that transpired feel present to this day: in police harassment, disproportionate incarceration, hyper-surveillance and all the promising futures derailed by a system focused on social control and maintaining the power hierarchy within the US. Reformatories were established with the belief that young offenders were deserving of mercy away from hardened adult criminals. But it was neither mercy nor a foundation for adulthood that these schools offered.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.