‘Nickel Boys’ Review: RaMell Ross Breaks Free of Reform-School Tropes, but Loses the Plot in the Process
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic From “Boy A” (the movie that launched Andrew Garfield’s career) to “Zero for Conduct,” movies set in broken boarding schools and juvenile reformatory centers are a dime a dozen.
With “Nickel Boys,” director RaMell Ross finds fresh colors in such a rigidly codified genre, turning a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem.
The book by Colson Whitehead is brilliant, but much of it you’ve probably seen before on-screen, so Ross strips away as many of the words as possible, searching instead for images to tell the story of Elwood, a Tallahassee teen who’s so much more than a victim of the system.
Except, Ross doesn’t tell the story so much as inhabit it, to the extent I found myself wondering whether I could have followed the plot — which alternates between the 1960s and the early 2000s — had I not already read Whitehead’s novel. (I suspect that will pose a challenge for others, who should take the unconventional form as an invitation to look beyond the plot for other ways of participating in Elwood’s experience.) For the first hour or so, “Nickel Boys” feels like the most exciting narrative debut since “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Then Ross tries something bold that doesn’t quite work, and the experiment collapses upon itself.
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